Why are typographic grids so important to designers and readers?
The role of grids is to serve as a container for text.
Grids frame and define content.
From the earliest handwritten and printed books,
grids have played a starring role in presenting content and information.
Just to give you a quick bit of history and background on how grids have evolved,
here's a look at one of the oldest known manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls,
written using a simple grid format of columns.
This ancient Coptic Manuscript page is arranged in two columns,
with hanging initial caps setting within its margins.
For many hundreds of years,
religious texts were the dominant form of written manuscripts.
Breviaries and Bibles were typically lettered in a two-column format or grid.
And the first printed book, Johannes Gutenberg's 42-line Bible,
replicated the two-column format to imitate a hand-written manuscript.
Our modern Bibles almost all conform to the two-column grid.
In early printed books, we see many examples of a single column on a page.
Most of the text-heavy books that we read today, both fiction and
non-fiction, have a single column on a page.
The simplest grid is a single column width with a fixed depth and fixed margins.
These are typical for books and scholarly journals, for example.
The margins of a classical book page create a clean border
around a justified solid block of text.
Even a one-column grid needs to be carefully considered.
It determines the appearance and
type area of the page, and also where page numbers and chapter headings will sit.
A good proportion for books will depend, first of all, on the page size.
There are no hard and fast rules, but
a good book design grid will always have four important measurements.
First, the inner margins will be generous enough so that when the book is held open,
based on its number of pages, the text will not be curving into the middle.
Readers need to see the text on a flat surface.
Second, the top margin should be more than the inner margin of a single page.
Third, the outer margins should be slightly larger than the top margin,
because that is where we place our thumbs when we are holding a book open.
Fourth, the bottom margins should be largest of all.
This is because our eyes need to see the largest or heaviest space at the bottom.
It provides a kind of visual anchor.
The size and proportions of margins in relation to the text block are important.
They frame the text and
give the reader's eye a needed breath of air within the visual space they provide.
There's a feeling of comfort when margins are generous, and
there's a feeling of discomfort when they are skimpy.
This holds true for both print-based design and screen-based design.
It's just as important to have some space around your text on screen.
And extra letting is important to increase legibility for
body copy on screen-based projects, because light-emitting surfaces are a bit
harder on the eyes than reflective surfaces.
Readers need and expect the orderliness of a simple grid to help them read and
absorb lengthy passages of text.
That's why there's a grand tradition of basic manuscript grids in
arranging texts for books.
Take advantage of the established conventions of the book or
manuscript grid when you are considering what will work best for your project.