The Alcoa Visual Design System Our grid system Our grid system should be used for all marketing, advertising and collateral materials. With the exception of PowerPoint®, using the grid will help achieve a consistent look and feel as well as a solid visual and structural balance. The following grids will serve as an excellent starting point for the development process. Our flexible 12-column grid system helps to ensure an organized look and feel to all advertising and marketing materials. This grid system will provide effective guidelines to help organize text and images on a page. The grid also helps to standardize the size and proportion of all the essential brand elements. A grid system is a two-dimensional structure made up of a series of vertical and horizontal guidelines which are used to help structure content. Three simple elements compose the grid: Text columns and gutters The vertical magenta rules indicate body text columns with fixed gutters. Our system uses 12 columns with a 0.125" gutter. All margins are set at 0.5". Horizontal grid The horizontal cyan rules show our page is further broken into 12 horizontal columns to help proportion the page. Baseline grid The baseline grid helps to align all elements to a common base. To set up your baseline grid, go to your preferences/grids. 14