If your base gutter is 12, the next step might be 18 or 24. You can also employ units with padding as you mentioned. To keep a well organized grid, you can set the type in some kind of container that adheres to the base grid with the type inset by a unit or two or three.
Updated for January 12, 2017 (Toddlers) patch. Pose Player. This is a mod that will add the option to play poses and animations in game. It adds an interaction to your sims called Pose By Name and Pose By Pack. Just click on your sim like you would to do anything else.
I play in windowed mode and I have all my pose player codes written on notepad with a link to pictures of the custom poses. You can see below that I can see my pose codes below my game, so it makes it easy to type them into the pose player.