A grid is not a cage. It is the thing that lets you make fifty pages look related without measuring every margin by hand.

We start most projects by setting a column and baseline grid before any content goes down. It sounds slow. It is the opposite. Decisions about where things sit are already made, so the work is placing, not agonising.

The grid also tells you when to break it. A full-bleed image or an oversized number reads as deliberate only because everything around it obeys the rule.

Learn the grid, then break it once per spread. That is the difference between tidy and alive.