Today I tried to recreate a very common web layout grid in Sketch:
12 columns
64px column width
32px gutter
Simple.
What I want the tool to do is obvious:
define the columns and gutters, and calculate the container width automatically.
But Sketch doesn’t let you choose which value should adapt.
Instead, when you change one parameter, another one changes automatically, and you don’t control which one. So you end up adjusting numbers back and forth until the math finally matches the grid you wanted in the first place.
The grid itself follows a perfectly logical formula:
total width = columns × column width + gutters
The problem isn’t the math.
The problem is the interaction.
Modern tools like Figma solved this years ago by letting designers define the structure they care about and resolving the rest automatically.
It’s a small detail, but grids are one of the most fundamental tools in UI design.
And sometimes in Sketch, something that should take ten seconds turns into five minutes of fighting numbers.
Upvoted. We’re always fighting with the grids. This topic many times brought up in this forum. I don’t like referencing Figma, but their layout grid approaches are very intuitive and easy to use. It’s in the right sidebar(quick access), customization options are great.
I agree with all of you, it’s quite lacking in a number of ways, and we need to revamp it completely. It’s just been hard to prioritize over the heavy hitters we‘ve been working on in the past few releases, but I’d like to get to it at some point.
I understand that a full redesign can be a bigger effort and harder to prioritize.
But maybe there’s room for a smaller incremental improvement in the meantime. For example, allowing the user to choose which parameter should be calculated automatically and which ones should remain fixed.
In practice, designers often start from something like “12 columns, 64px columns, 32px gutters” and expect the container width to be derived from that. In other cases, the container width might be the fixed value and the columns adapt instead.
Right now the system always recalculates something, but the user doesn’t control which parameter is the flexible one. Giving designers that control could remove a lot of the friction without requiring a complete redesign of the layout grid feature.
Even a small change like that would make the interaction feel much more predictable
