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Effective layout is essential to communication and enables the end user to not only be drawn in with an innovative design, but to digest information easily. Making and Breaking the Grid is a comprehensive layout design workshop that assumes that in order to effectively break the rules of grid-based design, one must first understand those rules and see them applied to real-world projects.
Basics include composing typographic space, format determination, and sequencing and systemization. Various types of grids manuscript, column, modular, hierarchical are also covered.
Text reveals top designers’ work in process and rationale. Projects with similar characteristics are linked through a simple notational system that encourages exploration and comparison of structure ideas. Each project is shown comprehensively so readers can see its structure revealed over several pages, at a size that allows for inspection of detail.
Also included are historical overviews that summarize the development of layout concepts, both grid-based and non-grid based, in modern design practice.
From the Publisher
Grid Basics – Fundamental Concepts of Page Structure
A grid consists of a distinct set of alignment-based relationships that serves as a guide for distributing elements across a format: where they may be placed; their height-to-width proportions; and, ultimately, the ease with which a viewer can navigate the layout. A grid’s orthogonal (90° axis) logic, and all the thinking about how to work with it, derive from the fundamental verbivisual qualities of type. Choosing or developing a grid for a project depends on understanding these qualities, knowing what kinds of grids there are, and the possibilities for how type (and images) might interact within the structure.
Grid Basics
The Anatomy of Pages.
Building a Grid: For Interaction Design – Layout in a Responsive Context
Control over layout parameters for screenbased design has come a long way since the Internet first came online in the mid-1990s. Today, designers have nearly the same facility for precision in Web-based layout as they do for print. Grid use in UX design has come to the fore as the result of the need to structure online communications to adapt to browsing within format interfaces of extreme difference in size; the grid’s modularity lends itself to designing flexible systems of this very nature.
___ Challenges continually arise in attempting to maintain the presence of the structure— aided by rigorously templated development tools—while achieving a recognizably unique visual presentation that doesn’t appear templated. Although the limitations of device-specific screen size are typically considered from the outset of a project with regard to functionality, a project’s look and feel are likely developed within the desktop browser’s larger screen space—discrepancies in the structure reveal themselves as designers work to unify stylistic compositional aspects. Incongruities such as these—misalignments between navigation and content areas, conflicts between symmetrical and asymmetrical arrangements, loss of important margin area needed for particular compositional gestures—are common problems.
Resolving them well means conceiving the grid structure from the column or module outward, rather than reverse engineering it from a fully developed grid structure defined for the large-browser experience.
Exibits
03 Modular Grid / ‘Graph Paper’ Variant
A comfortably proportioned modular grid provides overall branding continuity and endless layout variations for Springer, a publisher of textbooks. The program uses a grid of modules that, unlike other grids of this kind, butt each other like a chessboard. The lack of gutters or margins means that the actual book formats can be configured on the grid for greater consistency, and the gridded image areas always align with each other and with the book’s spine and edges.
___ The schematic shows the publisher’s in-house designers a number of options for using the grid to vary the placement of images, type areas, and areas of flat color. Sequences of books in a single subject can be grouped with a single layout, but be given their own identities through color and image variation. Bold scientific materials, as well as more reserved layouts for literature and critical essays, are equally possible.
07 Modular Grid with Deviations
This exhibition poster uses an exceptionally large module—relative to the proportion of the format—as the basis for its composition.
___ The letters forming the exhibition’s title are laid out in a 4 x 5 grid of vertically proportioned modules that bleed to the edges of the poster’s format—there are no margins. The alternating black and white fields create backgrounds for the individual letters.
___ Similar to conditions in the poster shown on the opposite page, the designer ‘cheats’ his grid a little to ensure the legibility of the letters (as well as to improve the decisiveness of the shapes created along their adjacencies), shifting them upward or sideways to help reveal their forms, but the grid remains clearly present as an ordering structure.
___ Overlaps and vibrating juxtapositions of black and white areas introduce detail variation on top of the regular understructure. The dramatic scale of the title gives way to a more focused column of time and date description in the far right column.
19 Hierarchic Grid
A grid-based set of proportions, mathematically derived from the width of these small-format Biblical extracts, provides a clean, simple structure for their titling. The depth of the first hangline, for the title itself, is the square of the book’s width. The secondary information is given specific position, respective of its place in the hierarchy (subtitle, Biblical notation, author, translator). The use of a structural underline and linear-rule bracket for separation of elements in this area lends contrast to the mysterious photography, as well as a more modern sensibility.
Alternative Architectures.
ASIN : B0749NXZGD
Publisher : Rockport Publishers; Updated, Expanded edition (June 1, 2017)
Publication date : June 1, 2017
Language : English
File size : 38612 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Not Enabled
Print length : 240 pages