New Plugin, New features, New pricing
Apr 25, 2023 | Written by
Cameron McEfee
How’s it going? It’s been a while since we’ve talked. I’m sure you’ve been up to some very interesting things, but today I’m going to talk about what I’ve been up to.
As of reading this blog post, you can now download new versions of every GuideGuide plugin. I would call it GuideGuide 6, but I switched to the calver versioning format. It’d be more accurate to call it “GuideGuide released in 2023, April, third or fourth release, depending”. Has a nice, SEO-optimized mouthfeel to it, don’t you think?
Here is a non-exhaustive of everything that’s new and changed.
Support for InDesign
The biggest news in this update is that GuideGuide is now available for InDesign. This means you can use all of GuideGuide’s benefits in your favorite layout tool, and even — get this — add rows to your documents. I know, I can’t believe it either.
Native support for Photshop on M1 Macs
GuideGuide is no longer a “legacy plugin” that requires running Photoshop via Rosetta.
Grid Notation updates
Grid Notation received a few new features and changes, but at the top of the list is blocks, a way to encapsulate specific portions of a grid so that they can be constrained separately or referenced in other grids. This allows for creating things like grid elements that use aspect ratios or evenly spaced margins that are based on the size of another object or dimension.
Here’s an example:
# Store our margin
$margin = 40px
# Measure the width of a column using a capturing block
$columns = $margin*2 { ~ } ~ ~ (vnl $WIDTH)
$column = | ~ | (vnl $columns[1])
# Create a row that is 9/16 in height
$row = | { 56.25% } | (vnl $column)
# Create our grid
$margin | $column*3 | $margin (vnl)
$margin | $row* | $margin
For more information, check out the new Grid Notation docs.
New unit types
As design apps have evolved and GuideGuide has introduced support for new ones, there are more unit types that it can work with. New in this release are feet, yards, meters, and agates.
New interface
The grid form interface has been updated to group grid concepts together under labels, rather than relying entirely on icons. This will probably be temporarily unpopular with long-time users, but should hopefully be more intutive to newbies.
The style of GuideGuide now varies depending on the app you use it in to create a more native feeling experience.
New pricing
Looking to the future, I want to spread GuideGuide farther, both to new people and into new apps. To keep in line with this goal, I’ve decided to lower the overall annual price of GuideGuide. You can read about the new tiers here.
New education licenses
GuideGuide is free for students and teachers as long as they are in school or employed by a school. With this new version of GuideGuide, I’m introducing an education license. This means I can provide students and teachers a no-strings-attached experience instead of requiring them to sign up and risk being charged if they forget to renew the discount. Find out more here.
Finally
Back in 2018, I publically made it a goal to turn GuideGuide into my full time job. At the beginning of 2022, I finally made the leap. This is my first major launch since then and it feels good to publish something I’ve built with my full attention. I hope you enjoy the updates and find something that makes your life a little bit easier.
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