e.

structure and

integrity

In designing print publications (and all the more for digitals), grids make it possible
to determine practically any parameter. They are truly a universal tool. But in most cases the grid determines only several of the most important features of any layout:
the width of the text area, the size of type and leading, and the division of the text in columns.

f.

proportionality

Everything in the fine arts depends on proportions and relations. The experience of artists in earlier centuries hinted at the existence of elusive laws of beauty, responded to by all viewers, that were at bottom mathematical. Painting, icons, photography are obvious examples: the canvases of Botticelli, icons in churches and the photographs of Cartier-Bresson — all have the axes of the Golden Ratio. Many designers are in the habit of calculating everything — format, grid modules, relationships of type sizes. There exist two basic kinds of proportions — the rational and the irrational.

g.

modular scales

Grids are generally thought to be of two kinds — typometric and metric. In fact, this division is largely artificial, and the very concepts of “typometric” and “metric” are rather the names of two different systems of measurement (the first measures in points, the second in millimeters). One can speak of two principles of page design, each depending on what you make of first importance: the relationships between the classical typographic parameters such as type size, leading, text area and page format or the subordination of all layout elements to the precise, independent structure
of a module.