Grid

grid

Readymag Design Almanac is an educational project covering the fundamentals of design. This chapter explains the basics of the grid—any designer’s core tool for organising visual space. The text surveys the inner structure of 13 different projects, from online shops to media websites to books and magazines, explaining how their authors turn chaos into cosmos with the help of the grid.

2

Theory

 

 

 

 

3

Practice

 

1

Introduction

Invisible lines

An Easy Recipe

Structure

Module as Means

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Structure and Integrity

Proportionality

Modular Scales

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grid

Theory

a.

invisible lines

Almost every layout has axes, invisible guidelines along which the key elements — text blocks, headlines, illustrations — are arranged. These guidelines are the elements of the grid. A grid can be very primitive and, for a book with a simple structure, may merely to be the baselines and margins of the text. Or it can be very complex, since it will have to deal, say, with the variety of texts, headlines, photos, announcements and graphics that make up a newspaper. For a multi-column magazine, the grid may unexpectedly change the number of columns from section to section, or on a website extend or compress in response to the width of the browser. 

 

The structural basis of a composition is not always visible to the inexpert eye, but a layout without a grid is unlikely: it is almost surely there.

 

 

W

formerlyyes.com online store

Grid

Practice

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.