Grid Excavations
A research project attempting to reconstruct the underlying grid systems of canonical 20th-century publications. Starting from a printed page, working backward to the system.
The method is simple in description and difficult in practice. Take a printed page from a publication with a well-regarded layout — say, a spread from the original run of Neue Grafik, or a chapter opening from a Tschichold-designed book. Scan it at high resolution. Trace the text blocks, the margins, the gutters.
Then try to find the grid.
Grids are not always present. Some layouts are developed by eye, adjusted by hand, corrected in proof. Some grids are simple and some are elaborate. Some publications use one grid for text pages and a different one for image pages. The excavation reveals these decisions in reverse.
What I've found, after examining forty-seven publications, is that the most compelling layouts are almost never the most systematic. The grid is a framework, not a rule. The designers who made the best work knew exactly where and why to break it.
