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Visual Communication

The Grid Came Later

·4 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

A page can be broken in more than one way, and the designers usually named for breaking it — László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, the Zurich Dadaists — worked before the thing they are said to have broken existed. The modular grid as a stated system is usually credited to Swiss designers working after the Second World War.1 That leaves this essay a smaller subject than the one it was given, and a more useful one: what a grid is made of, and how little is known about setting a page without it.

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • What a Müller-Brockmann grid is made of
  • Who broke the page, and when
  • The claim this essay cannot make
  • Where this leaves the column

About the book

Notes

  1. Wim Crouwel 2011, passage on grids. A designer’s recollection in an interview rather than a history: Crouwel names Bill, Gerstner and Müller-Brockmann as the developers of the grid in graphic design. No scholarly account of when the grid was codified was reached for this edition; Robin Kinross, Modern Typography, is the book that would settle the dating and is not in this registry. Evidence C: professional practice or tradition.

Sources

  • Wim Crouwel (2011). Interview for the exhibition Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey, Design Museum, London; the interview was recorded in December 2010. Reproduced on neugraphic.com. neugraphic.com

Further reading