Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type [Paperback]

You may at first be tempted to buy this book for one or more of the following reasons:

(a) if you leaf quickly through it, you'll see lots of grid thumbnails, which may give you the impression that a range of different grid possibilities is carefully explored and explained;

(b) you'll also find several design pieces (pictures of posters, ads etc) with transparent overlays containing grids, suggesting that each piece is carefully analysed and explained;

(c) it's published by Princeton Architectural Press, so hey, it must be good.

Unfortunately, if you do buy the book for one of the reasons above, you're in for a lot of disappointment.

You'll find that the actual text is like a series of quick notes such as what you'd expect to see in a slide show, except that there's no speaker or presenter to give you the actual explanations and help you make sense out of all the images. In other words, you'll be confronted with a few bits of text that don't really teach you much besides a few (very few) basic concepts and which don't even properly explain the images. (And if you really believe that an image is worth a thousand words, good luck deciphering the message.)

Most pictures of ads and such are accompanied by transparent overlays; some of these contain lots of lines, circles and crosshairs. You'd think there's an explanation somewhere as to what all the lines, crosshairs and whatnot mean, but that's not the case.

Take the Nike ad on pages 64-5, for instance. The overlay has a complex grid with four darker areas, and five even darker ones, plus external lines that seem to indicate that some sort of proportion exists (and is therefore going to be explained). But here's ALL the author has to say about the pictures and the overlay:

"These are pages from a catalog of seasonal products for outdoor-industry professionals and athletes. The typography appears on the vertical in a band that spans the spread. The band is punctuated by solid vertical rules that change color and reverse out the product name. The descriptive text follows the vertical rule, with size and pricing information in bold. The rules and text have the option to flow across the gutter from the left page onto the right page. The images float in between bands of text and vignettes".

That's it. The text above appears before any of the pictures and is in no way visually connected to the overlay. You'll end up guessing what some of the lines in the overlay refer to, but will be left to wonder what most of the others mean.

And that's not all: all the grids [briefly] explained by the author are square, divided into three equal horizontal and vertical sections. However, most of the design pieces presented in the book are rectangular, and not one of them is divided in the familiar 3×3 grid. There's no explanation anywhere as to how the transition from square to rectangles can or should be made, and there's no information as to how the 3×3 grids relate to the 4×4, 4×6 etc grids you'll find on the overlays.

The first overlay (page 35) is presented right after the first series of 3×3 square grids, but it's a rectangle with no less than 14 horizontal lines, 5 vertical lines, and 2 unequal, overlapping columns (one of the rules that must be followed in the grid exercises is "no overlapping"). There's no introduction to this new logic, no explanation about the proportions; just a bit of history about the 1928 brochure which apparently is a cornerstone of modern design.

I became aware of how important grids are when I was at art college and came across the first issue of a new design magazine, 'New Graphic Design' in 1958. Published in Switzerland in English, German and French and containing dozens of pictures but without a strict grid all the issues of this stunning publication would look a mess. The grid, put simply is a framework which allows several elements (photos, graphics, text, display type etc) to be placed in a rectangle and all work towards one aim, clarity of presentation. Virtually all publications use a grid (in its simplest form it could be called the type area) check out the page number position in a magazine, always in the same place defined by the grid.

Having used grids for years I'm surprised that there is so much confusion but that was before I read through Kimberley Elam's book. The straightforward becomes the obscure despite the good intentions. The most useful parts are the pages that use a see-through overlay, revealing the essence of the grid and nicely some disasters, too. What could be simpler than the two examples shown on page thirty-eight and nine, Christof Gassner's 1960 redesign of one page of a theater program, from the dull and confusing to something so elegant and simple. What is really interesting about the page is that it is all done with type only. Page forty-five uses another overlay for the contents spread of a book (designed by Drenttel Doyle Partners in 1988) the see-through reveals a simple grid but the actual spread is a complete mess with type everywhere, even the three words 'Table of contents' is letterspaced in two typefaces, roman and sans.

The two examples of the grid I've mentioned perhaps sum up the problems that a reader of this book might have, most of the European grid examples shown use the grid to simplify the placing of all the elements on a page, especially the typography. The American examples show basic grid versions that are virtually ignored when it comes to placing the page elements. This becomes evident in the last pages of the book where thirty-four design thumbnails are shown, one would not know they conform to any grid at all as each example shows a mixture of display type, text setting and graphics in no coherent order, in fact the very opposite of what a grid is supposed to do with these same elements. Perhaps the key element in any publication grid is the size of the text and headline types, because these (especially the text size) remain the same on every page and other elements, photos and graphics, need to be positioned within the grid defined by the typography.

I think 'Grid Systems' is pretty hopeless in explaining the virtues of this essential design format and strangely there is a real dearth of titles about the subject, perhaps it's just a bit too narrow or technical for most graphic art publishers. The great Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann explains it all in his excellent Grid Systems in Graphic Design/Raster Systeme Fur Die Visuele Gestaltung (German Edition) though it's not mentioned in the bibliography of 'Grid Systems' but two of his other books are.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Kimberly Elam must be famous enough that a publisher will take her notebooks or scrapbooks and have them typeset without much editing and without giving any real thought to trifling details such as the reader.

This book is just a collection of notes that may make sense to the person who wrote them, but are not very illuminating to someone looking for a methodical approach to the subject -- unless, of course, that someone is telepathic and can read the author's mind.

Save your money.