Before we jump headfirst right into the icy cold waters of layout design, let's talk briefly about what we are making, as it wouldn't be useful to just start laying out a grid without a purpose. In our work, we want to make content or data useful. Often in application development, someone asks for a high-level view of some data set—the ubiquitous dashboard or executive view. So let's make this our practice today: to make a layout for a useful application that gives a decision-maker an at-a-glance view of a daily capacity-utilization metric. See what I did there? I said a lot of things that an executive would like to hear, without saying too much.
Without further ado, let's make this dashboard!
Get your code editor spun up, and let's create this dashboard. Since this is a data visualization tool, we want the audience to focus on the data being presented; therefore, we will use the monochromatic blue color scheme we selected in the previous section.