Design with the National Park Service Unigrid
usethisfordesign is part of KhannaOffice’s Unigrid research: a free tool for making layouts with the National Park Service Unigrid, the publication system designed by Massimo Vignelli and developed with NPS Publications Chief Vincent Gleason. Read the paper, Unigrid: The National Park Service Publication System, Reconstructed.
Choose a space on the sheet, then add photographs, text, or colour. Every placement follows the reconstructed Unigrid geometry, so the proportions, modules, intervals, title band, and foot bar remain part of the composition without requiring you to measure them yourself.
What is Unigrid?
Unigrid is the publication design system developed for the United States National Park Service beginning in 1977. Led within the Service by Publications Chief Vincent Gleason and designed by Massimo Vignelli, it gave hundreds of parks a common system for producing maps, guides, folders, and other printed information.
Rather than prescribing one fixed layout, Unigrid organized publications through a repeatable field of modules and intervals. Content could change from park to park while the underlying relationships remained consistent.
The Service documented the system in a detailed 1985 specification. KhannaOffice reconstructed that specification mathematically and implemented its geometry in software.
A working reconstruction
This tool uses the reconstructed B6 Unigrid sheet, measuring 420 × 594 mm, generated from the documented geometry: modules of 84 × 80 points separated by intervals of 12 × 10 points.
The browser implementation preserves these numerical relationships while adapting them to a digital medium. The evidence behind the reconstruction, and the distinction between documented and adapted behaviour, are in the research paper.
Use the sheet for a trip, family year, wedding, exhibition, class project, field guide, photo essay, or archive.
Export, and keep your work
A completed Unigrid exports as a PDF (front and back, at 420 × 594 mm), a PNG for sharing, or an SVG for further editing.
Your Unigrid stays on the device where you make it. The contents of your sheet are never uploaded to KhannaOffice; return to the tool on the same device and your work remains where you left it.
The sheet’s numbers
Every measurement on the B6 sheet, with its evidence class: specified by the 1985 plate, derived from it, set by the package’s own rule, or measured off the plate.
| Measurement | Value | Class |
|---|---|---|
| Trim | 420 × 594 mm · 1190.551 pt × 1683.78 pt | specified |
| Module | 84 pt × 80 pt | specified |
| Intervals | 12 pt × 10 pt | specified |
| Pitch | 96 pt × 90 pt | derived |
| Columns | 12 · field 1140 pt (402.17 mm) | package |
| Side margin | 25.276 pt (8.92 mm) each side, the field centred | package |
| Title region | 100 pt, holding one row at 10 pt–90 pt | derived |
| Rows fully exposed | 17 | derived |
| Lower bar | 25 pt, lower edge on the trim | specified |
| Clipped row | begins at 1630 pt; 53.78 pt inside the trim, 26.22 pt beyond it, 28.78 pt visible above the bar | derived |
| Side hairline | 4.846 pt | measured |
| Cell rule · tick | 0.722 pt · 0.391 pt, tick 5.443 pt long | measured |
| Title | cap 45.714 pt, cap top on the hidden row's top, left on the first column rule | measured |
Sources
- Read Unigrid: The National Park Service Publication System, Reconstructed for the historical evidence, measurements, equations, and reconstruction method.
- The tool is one part of the KhannaOffice Unigrid project; inspect the implementation on GitHub, or install
@khannaoffice/unigridfrom npm. - Unigrid originates with the National Park Service and Massimo Vignelli, with NPS Publications Chief Vincent Gleason, in 1977; KhannaOffice reconstructed it and published its numbers as the package above.
- Photographs in the example sheets are used under the Unsplash License and credited to their photographers on the sheets where they appear.