Hi everyone, it's Dan from Bring Your Own Laptop. Hey, I've been asked a question to do with columns  and designing, uh, websites in Photoshop. Now, uh, one of my students in one of the online courses,  uh, ki has asked, he's got a page  that he's designed in Photoshop. He's got his homepage, but he's finding it hard, uh,  to keep a consistency across the other pages  that he's designing in Photoshop. Now he's asked, can I add a 12 column grid after the fact? And he asked this because then the, probably the most, uh,  famous or the most common framework for doing this kind  of grid system on a website is something called Bootstrap.

Now, bootstrap uses a 12 column grid. So he wants to know can I add it  to Photoshop after I've made it. Now, in terms of adding it beforehand, it's really easy. You just find a template that has it. I've got one that you can download. I'll put a link down in the bottom here.

But essentially you start  with something like this in Photoshop  and you can see if I turn the grids on here, you can start  to see that there's 12 columns in all of these. Okay? So you can start with something like this,  but say you've got an existing file  and you want to add it in terms of knowing what kind  of columns you need to add is the first part. So if you are using something like Bootstrap  to get your grids going, even if you're not,  it's a good, um, starting point. Anyway, I'm using this version four, which is in, uh,  alpha testing at the moment. That'll be live soon.

If I go to documentation  and I go down to layout,  I'm looking for this one called grid. I scroll down here, scroll, scroll, scroll. This is the one I'm looking for, grid options. So say we're designing for this homepage here, okay? Oh, the large kind of desktop view, which is 60 REM. Now, uh, to go  through Reems right now is not the purpose of this.

Um, course it's on another one that I've done,  but the basics are 60 times whatever the default REM is,  which is normally 16 pixels,  which gives you 960 pixels across. Okay? So that's your width for your desktop view. So 960, say you wanna turn it into 12 columns, okay? So it is default of 12. What it's doing now is it's gonna add 15 pixels either side  of all those columns, okay?

So you divide your nine 60 by 12  and then you've gotta allow for 15 pixels either side  of your columns as like a little bit  of a buffer or a column width. That's what we need to do. If that bamboozles you don't worry. It bamboozles me too. Um, so just copy what I do in Photoshop. I've worked it out ahead of time.

Let's go to Photoshop. Uh, let's make a new document. I'm gonna have a width of nine 60 a height. Uh, it doesn't really matter. We use 1800. It's gonna resolution seven two.

So say you've got this existing site, this one here. Now what we wanna do is we want to add columns to it. So the long way is you could turn your rulers on  for the view rulers and you could start dragging this out. Now the big problem with this is that,  to be honest, it'd be impossible. Like you'd be dragging these things out,  lining 'em up with the rulers. There's other slight better ways of doing it,  but you'd be there forever trying to line things up.

And if you've done it before, um,  you're probably gonna cry when you see this easy method. So let's switch to the easy method. Let's go to view. There's one down here. It says new guide layout. Okay, so if I click on this one  here, it does some nice things.

I've got some presets, so I can go to 12 columns, magic,  and I can also go to the gutter. Remember the gutters? And this one was 30. Okay? So you can see in the background here there's gaps of 30. But what I want to do is I need 15 pixels,  either side of the column.

So I've got the 15 pixels either side  to make the 30 for these center ones. But I need 15 on these little outside guys as well. So that's where this little margin comes in. So I'm gonna turn the margin on left. 15 pixels, right, 15 pixels and click okay. Voila.

You've got a 12 column grid  with the perfect 15 pixels, either side buffering  or padding between them on an existing document. Now I love to share  and help, so drop me any questions you  might have in the notes below. But if you are serious about learning how  to make money building professional website mockups in  Photoshop, uh,  you can check out my full course of over 50 videos. Uh, there's a link in the description. As always, please like and subscribe, hide it. Our good people always wave at the end here,  and there's no reason for it.