![]() ![]() Typically, a 960px wide page is divided in 12, 16, or 24 columns - synonyms for classicism, complexity… and madness. Positioning or aligning elements on an horizontal grid is fairly simple and borrows a lot from print rules. Type should actually be the scale that defines almost everything else. As Robert Bringhurst wrote in The Elements of Typographic Style: “Don’t compose without a scale”. Building a horizontal grid is of course a fundamental step, but creating vertical rhythm is equally important. Plenty of online tutorials, templates and calculators exist to create grids, but not all of them place the emphasis on what makes a grid valuable: typographic rhythm and the baseline grid. Today it is inconceivable that a UI does not fit into a grid system no matter how complex it is. What had been for ages the canons of print design has become a prerequisite of UI design. Constant improvements, coupled with both professional maturity among digital designers and an increasing interest for more rational design (Bauhaus, Swiss style, Ulm School), undeniably led to the return of the grid. Creating an online masterpiece à la Müller Brockmann was close to impossible mainly due to technological restraints. In the early age of Internet, when the computer was the only interactive screen around, graphic design possibilities were extremely limited. Why is it that grid systems have become so popular among digital designers? The answer might be that now, good old print principles have become applicable to the screen(s). ![]() A deliberately composed design has a clearer, more neatly arranged and more successful effect than an advertisement put together at random.” The Return of the Grid “The grid makes it possible to bring all the elements of design - type characters, photography, drawing and colour - into a formal relationship to each other that is to say, the grid system is a means to introducing order into a design. Users should be left with the impression that things are easy to handle if the order employed at crafting them suggests so.Īs Josef Müller Brockmann wrote is his book The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems: Order is suggested more than it is made obvious. generally resides in the fact that the grid employed to design them is totally invisible. The beauty of these objects - music players, books, magazines, mobile phones, websites, etc. Among them, Van de Graaf, Rosarivo, and ultimately Tschichold who popularized his predecessors’ discoveries in his book The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design.ĭesigning within a grid space is indeed an old tradition that finds its roots in the need for structure and balance.Ī lot of the things that surround us are designed following modernistic principles of grid systems. These principles were later studied by typographers and designers in the beginning of the 20th century to reverse-engineer medieval canons of page construction. However, grids are nothing new and can be traced back to Middle Ages: in the 1220s/1240s, French architect Villard de Honnecourt designed construction canons based on geometry. There is even a movie with characters trapped in what they call “the grid” “a final frontier”. A simple search on Google with the terms “grid” and “webdesign” returns almost 5 million results. Hundreds - not to say thousands - of articles, tutorials, books and websites solely dedicated to grids and their application in (web)design have been published in the last few years. Lately, grids have become the ultimate obsession of designers and design writers. ![]()
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