Hey and welcome back.
We're going to talk about the grid today.
Now, what is a grid?
Lots of people are scared of it for some reason.
You know, I get it.
Grids kind of look really restrictive and they look scary.
I mean, just look at this thing.
Wow.
Even though they look like prison bars, they aren't as restrictive as you may think.
The grid is a structure comprising of a series of lines that divide the page into columns.
We have vertical and horizontal, and this structure helps designers arrange content on a page like
you can see here, everything is sitting on a grid.
This is something we never included in our final designs.
You'll never see somebody printed poster like this and have a grid showing, or you'll never see a website
with a grid showing unless somebody purposefully did that.
But usually that's incredibly rare.
Maybe it's a stylistic approach, but I don't really recommend it now.
It serves as a skeleton for your layout.
And originally the grid came from print design.
But if we ever think about where there are grids, I mean, they're basically applied in a lot of places.
Let's take a look.
We got bookcases.
We even have subdivisions.
I mean, they are everywhere.
I want to show you more about, but I want to teach you a little bit of history, because I think understanding
the past will really help you understand the basics.
Now, grids have always been linked to typography over here, they were first used to arrange handwriting
on paper and then later on were transformed into the manuscript layout.
Could see this over here.
And we're going to get into with the manuscript layout, looks like, and what it comprises of.
Since the early days, grids were used to help aid readers in reading, now let's fast forward all the
way to the Renaissance.
Now, this era had a profound impact on great systems, I mean, many artists strived for perfect geometry.
Many paintings resulted in the centered symmetrical layouts like this.
We have very centered layout.
You could see all the symmetry and hidden geometry within this painting.
You wouldn't necessarily notice it if these guidelines weren't here to show you.
But this was a lot of Renaissance paintings really strived for.
You ever heard of the golden ratio in the 13th century, lied to Hong Kong.
It created the diagram to achieve harmonious design.
This diagram was a merger between the grid system and the golden ratio, and it was great to produce
page layouts based off of margins with fixed ratios.
And this technique is still used in today.
You can see that this is a fairly recent layout and it is in fact using it, jumping forward to the
industrial revolution, beginning of mass production and the rise of newspapers, posters, et cetera,
with so much content on one page, like, look at this, it's it's hard to read as is even with a nice
little grid layout, but with so much content on one page, design is needed to develop a way to communicate
their message while allowing for natural reading behavior.
They've achieved that here.
There are newspapers that were much worse than this.
Now, last stop, the grid we know and use today is very much tied to Swiss design, doesn't look like
much, but many systems were born from this.
I want you to Pictures' World War One.
And Switzerland was neutral.
Of course, we all kind of became a common meeting ground for creatives.
And because publications had to set three separate languages, which are German, Italian and French,
because there were so many or there was such an influx of people, designers needed to come up with
a solution to biographers like young, Jewish, old and horrible.
They stepped up to address that.
And for the first time, white space was used as an element in layered design.
And you can see that in a lot of layouts today, a lot of white space.
And they all kind of came from that.
Even if you look at the print design that we saw earlier showing that first grid, that kind of system
was born from this and Swiss design has a profound impact on that.
Now, we're going to jump in into some more basics.