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Product Description
Product Description
For designers working in every medium, layout is arguable the most basic, and most important, element. Effective layout is essential to communication and enables the end user to not only be drawn in with an innovative design but to digest information easily.
Making and Breaking the Grid is a comprehensive layout design workshop that assumes that in order to effectively break the rules of grid-based design, one must first understand those rules and see them applies to real-world projects.
Text reveals top designersÆ work in process and rationale. Projects with similar characteristics are linked through a simple notational system that encourages exploration and comparison of structure ideas. Also included are historical overviews that summarize the development of layout concepts, both grid-based and non-grid based, in modern design practice.
About the Author
Timothy Samara is a graphic designer and educator based in New York City where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Fashion Institute of Technology. He's also the author of The Typography Workbook (Rockport 2004). He lives in New York's Chelsea district.
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Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
The big book of clarity and chaos,
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This review is from: Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop (Paperback)
What a strange publication. Divided into two sections the first explaining grid formatting with actual printed material and the second revealing how to design print without a grid.There seems a contradiction here because the grid, used intelligently, will allow a whole range of graphic options to be presented with clarity. Some of the print examples reproduced in the first section do show this with perhaps the most useful item a grid thumbnail for each piece, unfortunately I thought it was rather too small as it is the key to explaining each format. From past experience, designing magazines, I would start work on a grid by concentrating on the text type size because it is the least flexible of all the elements on the page. This point really wasn't made enough of in the book's chapter: Grid Basics. The reproductions show a reasonable range of design solutions, essentially print though there is an example of corporate signage. Missing are magazines (consumer or trade) timetables and the like. Without a grid this type of printed matter really wouldn't exist. The book's contradiction, to my mind, start with the second section: Grid Deconstructions and Non-Grid-Based Design Projects. The forty items shown seem to have a couple of common threads: their design is essentially arbitrary which makes them look very messy and frequently their typography (display and text) is used as a design element which makes the words unreadable. Their design is the opposite of grid stimulated creativity, in other words visual chaos. Some of the examples are quite amazing. On page 180-181 twelve pages of a calendar are shown, totally useless as its impossible to see the days and dates. Pages 188-189 show eight spreads from a design school journal showing irregular shaped blocks of text creating a sort of collage. I doubt anyone made the effort to read any of it. What is interesting about this second section material is that so much of it comes from educational establishments. In the real world all this designer whimsy would be rejected by the client on sight of the first dummy 'Making and Breaking the Grid' is well printed with 175dpi and the layout is adequate and for a book about grids you would have thought its own grid would have been included but it is strangely missing. Overall I felt that because the contents present two opposite design ideals the book's editorial concept is rather flawed. From my experience there is only one book that really explains it all: Muller-Brockmann's `Grid Systems' (ISBN 3721201450) published in Switzerland and full of good solid practical hands-on information. This book's only purpose is creative clarity.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unreadable,
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This review is from: Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop (Paperback)
I'm bet none of the other reviewers have actually read this book. I'll further bet no one has with its turgid prose and small low contrast type, usually set against a colored background. Here's a small example, selected purely at random, page 112: "Collage was another new visual analogy that built on the reenvisioning of form begun in Cubism, which juxtaposed found images in dynamic relationships where chance could play a role in the perception of meaning." If you're the sort than enjoys sifting meaning from tangles like that, you'll find it here in most every sentence. The other seven billion of us will want clarity. It is an attractive book; as a coffee table decoration it'll impress visitors waiting in your reception. But nobody, including you, will actually read it. If you must, buy it used.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great book on handling type and layout,
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This review is from: Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop (Hardcover)
This is a developed look at handling type and page (surface) layout in a simple-yet-abstract way. Using grids and ideas presented in this book (with some practise), the learning designer can begin to utilise elements once thought as simple and static in ways which add dynamism to your layouts.For a designer such as myself, a fan of Swiss and Bauhaus, simplicity, directness, Making and Breaking the Grid is a book full of idea and potential. Although not radical per se, it is a concise look at one of the most powerful aspects of communication design out there, in my opinion. Definitely worth a look.
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