- Every digital image is, ultimately, constructed from a grid of neatly bound blocks.
- Typography is, by and large, an art of framing.
- Designers focus much of their energy on margins, edges, and empty spaces, elements that oscillate between present and absent, visible and invisible.
- Highly individualized pieces can fit together to form a unified whole.
- The Futurist movements of 1909 worked against, but inside the constraints of the letterpress. Dada artists and poets performed similar typographic experiments. Exposed the grid while trying to overturn it.
- Constructivism was another movement. They used rules to divide space, throwing its symmetry into a new kind of balance.
- Good: Staggering images in relation to content. Bad: forcing text to wrap around images.
- Programmatic approach to design - using a limited set of elements to construct diverse yet linked solutions.
- Tables and graphs are a variant of the typographic grid.
Working with a grid
- Golden Section - the ratio for the golden section is 1:1.618. The golden section appears in nature as well as in art and design.
- Single Column Grid - the simplest grid consists of a single column of text surrounded by margins.
- Multicolumn Grid - multicolumn grids provide flexible formats that have a complex hierarchy or that combine text and illustrations. The more columns you create, the more flexible the grid. A text or image can occupy a single column or can span several. Not all of the space has to be filled.
- The page can be created using vertical zones or horizontal zones (horizontal - hang line).
- Divisions can occur both horizontally and vertically.
- A fully functioning grid should allow some components to cross over multiple columns to "break the grid", while allowing generous swaths of white space to reveal the underlying grid.
- The web design process typically begins with designing a grid and wire frames. The visual details come later.
- Modular grid - a modular grid has consistent horizontal divisions from top to bottom in addition to vertical divisions from left to right. The modules govern the placement and cropping of pictures as well as text. An image or text block can occupy one or more modules.
- Modular grids are created by positioning horizontal guidelines in relation to a baseline grid that governs a whole document.
