Bill Israel notes a salient point about grid-based design:
I, admittedly, have a soft-spot for the clean, crisp look a grid-based layout provides, and grids can be an excellent way to lay out visually pleasing information, but do all these layouts1 have to look so similar?
There-in lies the inevitable conundrum regarding grid-based content.
At a fundamental level, all such designs share a common structure and foundation. The glass may be a different shade, or may be cut in so very many different ways yet it cannot escape a certain truth.
The super-structure is, at the core, virtually identical from one design to the next.
Grid based design has fantastic uses and the various frameworks surely speed up delivery of content. For news-print style content, there is precious little better than the grid. But it is not conducive to truly unique design.
If you start with nothing it forces you to think of everything, there is nothing pre-defined in how you present your content. It’s a blank slate where anything goes. Using a grid-based structure, where you are bound inside a set of boxes, is absolutely the antithesis of that very same thinking, even if there is a certain challenge in making boxes work.
The resulting designs are thus based on the same layout pedigree that will remain evident in any such presentation. A watermark if you will, flowing from one design to the next.
- visit Bill for examples given, his design and thoughts are well worth the trip (↩)
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of creativity, design, presentation, standards.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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