Making and Breaking the Grid

Exploring Other Options

A Guide to Grid Deconstruction and Nonstructural Design Approaches

Grid structure in typography and design has become part of the status quo of designing, but as recent history has shown, there are numerous other ways to organize information and images. The decision whether to use a grid always comes down to the nature of the content in a given project.

Sometimes that content has its own internal structure that a grid won’t necessarily clarify; sometimes the content needs to ignore structure altogether to create specific kinds of emotional reactions in the intended audience; sometimes a designer simply envisions a more complex intellectual involvement on the part of the audience as part of their experience of the piece. ...