- When you start working with grids,
you start seeing them everywhere.
Just like I have an album on my computer
for color palettes, and another for design inspiration,
I have one for grids.
When I need that little kick, I'll visit these examples.
It's not about copying,
but thinking differently than I normally do.
If I find something interesting,
I'm not gonna try to recreate the grid exactly,
I just need to get the gist of the structure.
I find this to be a great exercise.
Understanding how something is built under the hood.
I found this magazine in an old bookstore
and immediately bought it.
I love the order and chaos, combined.
How can so many little birds look so organized?
When I built the grid over it,
I discovered that it was a simple square, modular grid.
One of my favorite designers is Ken Briggs,
who did beautiful posters for the
National Theatre in London.
He had an incredible sense of scale,
and the ability to create excitement
with a limited typographic palette.
Once the grid is clear, I can find how the poster
is both precise and unexpected.
Herb Lubalin did things with layout in the 1960's and 70's
that are still fresh and remarkable.
This spread, for a story on Marilyn Monroe,
breaks all the rules of making type into shapes
and creating odd negative space.
Laying the grid over it,
I see how the proportions are rigidly maintained,
pulling all the elements together
and mixing the fluid forms of Marilyn's image
with the hard-edged rectangles of the typography.
I don't limit myself to looking only at print.
Lance Wyman's signage program
for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics,
is a symphony of squares and color.
I was completely surprised that the forms
were so simple when I explored the grid structure.
One of the trickiest layout problems
is organizing a whole batch of different images,
all with different shapes.
This can turn into a real mess, fast.
Erik Nitsche's grid for a book
does a beautiful job of maintaining structure.
Of course, the master of grids,
Josef Muller-Brockmann,
did more than simply use one structure of columns.
This grid alone is so simple and flexible,
but when I add the golden rectangle,
it's clear that nothing is arbitrary
or not the same proportion.
Finally, one of the greatest of grid examples
is Lou Dorfsman and Herb Lubalin's Cafeteria Wall for CBS.
The complex typography with hundreds of typefaces and sizes
mixed with real objects is a true symphony.
This would only be possible with the use
of the rigid, underlying grid structure.
Start an album on your computer,
and drop in any example that you find interesting.
You don't need to know what the grid is yet.
Take some time and explore how it was structured.
In a way, this is like the classic way painting was taught
to art students in the 1800's.
By sitting in front of the Mona Lisa and replicating it
to understand how it was made.