Getting your menus to look clean usually starts with mastering the roblox studio uigridlayout settings so you aren't manually positioning fifty different item buttons. If you've ever tried to build an inventory system or a shop page by hand-placing every single frame, you know it's a total nightmare. One tiny change to the button size and suddenly you have to move everything else by three pixels. It's tedious, and honestly, life is too short for that.
The UIGridLayout is basically your best friend when you want things to stay organized without the headache. It's a component you drop into a Parent frame, and it automatically snaps all the children (like Buttons or Frames) into a neat grid. But, while it sounds simple, the actual settings can be a bit finicky if you don't know which buttons to turn.
Understanding CellSize and CellPadding
The first thing you'll probably mess with is the CellSize. This is what determines how big each individual item in your grid is going to be. In Roblox, you've got two options for these values: Scale and Offset. If you're just starting out, you might be tempted to use Offset because it's easier to visualize. You set it to 100x100, and it looks perfect on your monitor.
The problem? As soon as someone opens your game on a phone, those 100-pixel buttons might take up half the screen. That's why using Scale for your roblox studio uigridlayout settings is usually the way to go. Scale is a decimal between 0 and 1 representing a percentage of the parent container. If you set the X scale to 0.2, you'll always have five columns regardless of the screen size.
Then there's CellPadding. This is the "breathing room" between your items. Again, you can use Scale or Offset here. I usually like to use a very small Scale value (like 0.02) to keep the gaps consistent. If you leave the padding at zero, your buttons are going to be glued together, which looks pretty unprofessional. Adding just a little bit of padding makes the UI feel much more polished and easier to navigate.
Sorting Your Items Properly
Once you've got the size down, you have to figure out how Roblox decides which item goes where. By default, the SortOrder is set to Name. This is fine if you're naming your items "A," "B," and "C," but it gets messy if you have a shop with prices or levels.
I almost always switch the SortOrder to LayoutOrder. This gives you way more control. Every GUI object has a property called LayoutOrder (usually at the bottom of the properties window). The UIGridLayout will look at those numbers and sort them from lowest to highest. It's a lifesaver when you want your "Best Seller" item to stay at the very top of the list regardless of what its name is.
You also have the FillDirection and FillDirectionMaxCells settings. FillDirection is pretty self-explanatory—do you want your grid to fill up horizontally or vertically? Most people stick with Horizontal. FillDirectionMaxCells is where you can limit how many items fit in a single row or column. If you want a strictly 3-column shop, you just set this to 3 and let the grid do the rest of the heavy lifting.
Dealing with the Stretched Icon Problem
One of the most annoying things about roblox studio uigridlayout settings is how they handle different screen ratios. If you use Scale for your CellSize, your buttons might look like perfect squares on a 1920x1080 monitor, but they'll turn into long, skinny rectangles on a mobile device held vertically. It's a classic Roblox dev frustration.
To fix this, you can't really rely on the UIGridLayout alone. You'll want to parent a UIAspectRatioConstraint to the UIGridLayout itself (or sometimes to the individual items, depending on your setup). This force-maintains the shape of the cells. If you set the AspectRatio to 1, your cells will stay as perfect squares no matter how much the parent frame stretches or shrinks. It's one of those "set it and forget it" tricks that saves you from a lot of bug reports later on.
Start Corners and Alignment
We don't often talk about the StartCorner setting, but it matters for the "vibe" of your menu. You can choose TopLeft, TopRight, BottomLeft, or BottomRight. Most Western games use TopLeft because that's how we read, but if you're making a specific type of HUD—like a hotbar that expands from the bottom—switching the StartCorner can make the animations and additions feel much more natural.
HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment are also huge. These decide where the "clump" of items sits if they don't fill up the entire frame. For an inventory, you probably want Center or Left alignment. If you have a shop with only two items but space for ten, Center alignment makes sure those two items aren't awkwardly hugging the left wall of the screen.
Why UIGridLayout Can Be Annoying
I'll be honest: the UIGridLayout isn't perfect. One of the biggest gripes devs have is that it completely takes over the Position property of the children. You cannot manually move a button that is inside a grid. If you try to tween a button to make it "pop" when a player hovers over it, the grid will fight you and snap it back.
If you need that kind of fancy movement, you sometimes have to get creative. A common workaround is putting a "Wrapper" frame inside the grid. The grid controls the position of the Wrapper, and then you can move the actual button inside that Wrapper frame. It adds a bit of clutter to your explorer window, but it's the best way to get those smooth UI animations while still benefiting from the automatic layout.
Practical Workflow Tips
When I'm starting a new UI project, I usually follow a specific order with my roblox studio uigridlayout settings to avoid re-doing work. First, I create the container frame and add the UIGridLayout. I throw in a few "dummy" frames so I can see what's happening.
I immediately set the CellSize to Scale so I can see how it reacts when I resize the Studio window. Then, I tweak the CellPadding. Once the basic structure looks okay, I add the UIAspectRatioConstraint I mentioned earlier. If the buttons look too small on big screens, I might use a UISizeConstraint to set a "Max" pixel size so they don't get ridiculously huge on 4K monitors.
Another thing to keep in mind is the ScrollingFrame. Most grids live inside a ScrollingFrame. If you do this, make sure your UIGridLayout is playing nice with the CanvasSize. There's a cool trick where you can use a UIListLayout or UIGridLayout and then use a script to automatically adjust the CanvasSize based on the AbsoluteContentSize property of the layout. This makes sure your scrollbar actually works and doesn't just stop halfway through your item list.
Wrapping Up
At the end of the day, the roblox studio uigridlayout settings are there to make your life easier, even if they feel a bit rigid at first. It's all about finding that balance between Scale and Offset and knowing when to use extra constraints to keep things looking sharp.
Don't be afraid to experiment with the different sorting methods and alignment options. UI design in Roblox is a lot of trial and error, but once you get a solid handle on how the grid behaves, you'll be able to whip up clean, responsive menus in a fraction of the time it used to take. Just remember to check your UI on the "Device Emulator" in Studio frequently—it's the only way to be sure your settings are actually doing what you think they're doing for every player.