THE NO NAME EVOLUTIVE CONCEPT
Even before any letter pressing, the grid was used on stone engraving or papyrus as a system of content organization to the oldest writings and languages. As well as the human knowledge grew, the grids evolved from simple parallel line successions to the pure optimization of the page compositions - from positioning and embedding illustrations to graphic identity and text, all in a perfectly harmonized and intentional layout. Later to be called artists, the monks showed us one of the prime examples that grids were not only born of mathematical and logical thinking but also used and influenced by ideology – this point in history is the start of our journey through the past of the grid systems as we emphasize the most important works and studies of the subject. During its life, the grid knew many fathers although never as loving as in the mid-half of the twentieth century (around the time the concept finally got a name). In Switzerland, Richard Paul Lohse, Max Bill and Karl Gerstner can be described as the artists who, although in different ways, gave more continuity to this old graphic concept. 50s and 60s graphic design aesthetics matched the thinking of the time in a way evolving the grid seemed so natural that most of the grid work till date is a direct association from the ‘swiss school’. This magazine, is therefor, in and out of itself an influence of the grids (or a grid of influences). Medieval, Renascence, Modern or Post-modern, all present in this publication in many ways than pure text mass. Every ever contribution to the concept is today intrinsic to our work as graphic designers: some love them, filling their every public conversation of nerdy jokes about them; and some are scared of them, jumping from page to page as quickly as possible.
EDITORIAL 1 GRID ANCIENT GRID MEDIEVAL GRID RENASCENTIST GRID 2 SWISS INFLUENCES STANDART GRID BROKMANN GERSTNER 3 POST MODERNIST GRID DIFFERERENCES GRID DIAGRAM
3 8-9 10-11 12-15 16-21 24-25 26-29 30-33 34-37 40-45 46-47 48-49
1 Born by the same hand that wrote the first system of symbols, along came Peace that said, as natural as so, “words are expressed with an order for that they can be understand”. Shortly after, lines and text structure were as physical as words, and so was the need for its organization. Peace and its relatives all liked to imagine the possibility of communication through time (without the need for the living speaker). The idea that one’s writing could be read millions years later excited them, and so they planted in our minds the concept of framing our texts, rationally so – a very special form of Peace, only later to be named typographical grids.
To understand these symbolic functions it will be necessary to first examine some key junctures in the pre-twentieth-century development of both the grid and, in some cases, its individual elements: the point (or coordinate), the axial line, and their mode of interaction. In terms of the impact the changing values of the grid’s constructive elements have on the meaning of the grid itself, a structural typology of the grid reveals four basic grid subforms: coordinate-based, intersection-based, module-based, and line-based. Although identical in appearance, the specific valuation of each element distinguishes in turn each of these subforms and is directly related to its symbolic content. Historically, these subforms are found to function in pairs and thus jointly to constitute two major forms. The first major form will be referred to as point-based and includes the coordinate- and intersection-based subforms. The second major form will be referred to as field-based and includes the module- and line-based subforms.
GRID A CONCEPT.
The grid has played a central role in the development and consolidation of the modern movement in twentieth-century graphic design. Due to its ostensible use during this period as a compositional design matrix for controlling the placement of typography and imagery, the modernist grid was present in the finished design. Consequently, its symbolic aspect is not generally recognized or even suspected. Though equally obscure in significance, the contrasting decorative role of the grid as a prominent piece of visual iconography in postmodernist graphic design more readily admits of a possible symbolic function.
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10-11
ANCIENT GRID Archaeologists Find Ancient Maya City With a Modern Grid Layout
The city, which contains flat-topped pyramids, is being excavated at NixtunCh’ich’ in Petén, Guatemala. It was in use between roughly 600 B.C. and 300 B.C., a time when the first cities were being constructed in the area. No other city from the Maya world was planned using this grid design, researchers say.“It’s a top-down organization,” said Timothy Pugh, a professor at Queens College in New York. “Some sort of really, really, powerful ruler had to put this together.”
Untitled, photography by Timothy Pugh.
12-13
MEDIEVAL GRID God close to the reader.
Birth of John the Baptist, manuscript page by Turin-Milan in the Book of Hours (Full Composition).
The point-based grid best characterizes the late medieval Christian world... used to emphasize the focusing potential of the coordinate, either in and of itself or as the conjunction of two axes. Other grid forms were nonetheless present as well. ...a simple, line-based grid is… used to position the double columns of text, the folios and headings, and the margins. These lines were derived from… Gothic manuscripts. In addition to vertical guidelines that helped establish the placement and width of columns and margins, illuminated Gothic manuscripts featured horizontal rules to guide the hand of the scribe who wrote the text.
This integration of text and image strongly suggests that both the layout of the page and the pictorial composition were planned and executed by the miniaturist himself. Such use of vertical and horizontal lines to position text and image does not greatly differ in principle from the twentieth-century modernist grid that acts as an understructure to control the layout of the page. Not only are rule lines visible beneath the lines of the page’s text, but the exact spacing of those lines continues the length of the page. Vertical spacing of the same width also correspond to a like positioning of edges and objects, resulting in a grid of uniform spacing based on the ruled line of text, which underlays and regulates the entire page composition.
MEDIEVAL GRID
14-15
In designing this page, the artist innovated visual counterpart to the practice of scriptural exegesis, a method of critically reading and comparing Biblical passages to discover hidden patterns of correspondence planted there by God. The discovery of these patterns could be accompanied by various forms of spiritual illumination, as was consistent with the anagogical principle holding that certain physical events or objects (in addition to scripture) contained the impress of the divine. When properly understood through contemplation, one’s consciousness would be led from the object to its transcendent source in God.
Birth of John the Baptist, manuscript page by Turin-Milan in the Book of Hours (Full Composition).
The true basis of the grid (and of God’s design plan which it symbolizes) is in fact the cross itself. …the horizontal and vertical beams are seen to represent - as is Christ Himself – the conjunction of heaven and earth respectively. It is the point of heavenly and earthly conjunction that is of fundamental importance here (i.e., of God becoming flesh)… The combined emphasis on coordinate and intersection was thus indissolubly linked in the symbolism of the pointbased grid of the later Middle Ages.
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RENASCENTIST GRID The field grid concept and its utilization.
Beginning with the Renaissance, however, there occurs a transition from a sacred to an increasingly secular world conception. This is accompanied by a corresponding shift from a grid based on value-loaded coordinates and intersections to one conceived of as a field comprised of points and axes possessing either neutral or numerical (quantitative) value. Field-based grids were used to emphasize the expansive potential of the repeated module or individual axis-line in continuous or near continuous extension. These elements in turn defined a set of horizontal relations occurring on a physical plane.
Untitled, woodcut by Albrecht Durer (Full Composition)
RENASCENCTIST GRID
18-19
The gain in priority status of axes and horizontal relations which characterizes the field-based grid is accompanied, in the same century, by history’s greatest expansion of global exploration and discovery. To aid this process, the Flemish mathematician and cartographer Gerardus Mercator revolutionized navigation by developing a grid with mathematically determined coordinates and straight axes of longitude and latitude to accurately represent relative physical distances on the spherical plane of the globe. This grid’s individual squares (like the axes) conveniently framed specific places. As a result, the grid functioned equally well as a field of either modules or axes.
Untitled, woodcut by Albrecht Durer (Full Composition)
Unlike the late medieval grid, the intention was not normally to lead the viewer of perspective from the material world into the sphere of the superphysical. Rather, the depicted space was conceived of as an extension of the viewer’s own space. Leon Battista Alberti, a painter and early propagator of the technique of perspective construction, wrote that the intended effect was similar to the experience of looking through a window. The instructional woodcut by the sixteenth-century graphic artist Albrecht Durer demonstrates the use of a grid for a similar recording of visual reality. In this instance, the grid visually breaks down the three-dimensional image into a set of modules for the purpose of transferring and reconstructing it on another surface with a corresponding grid. Also in this example, three paradigmatic themes of this period, each of which finds expression in the grid, may be observed. First, there is the intense fascination with surface appearance and its description. This is coupled, in leading individuals, with the quite different interest in the invisible laws and structural principles that underlie external appearance. And third, there is the increased status of the rational mind itself, seeking to discover structure through critical observation.
RENASCENCTIST GRID
Artist painting a portrait over a grid for accurate proportion, painting by Abraham Bosse (Full Composition)
As one moves from the Renaissance toward the twentieth century, there is a gradual shift in emphasis from appearance to structure accompanying the ever rapid growth of natural science (called natural philosophy). With the writings of the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, underlying structure and rationality achieve their most powerful expression. Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) was to serve as a principle stimulus informing not only the use and meaning of the grid in this period, but also problem solving in later twentieth-century design. With Descartes, knowledge is achieved by action of human reason, not divine revelation. Furthermore, the goal of knowledge is the physical world and its laws, not God and the supersensible world, as had earlier been the case. The grid’s identification with material reality and laws is evident in his treatise Geometry, also of 1637. There, Descartes lays the foundation for an analytical geometry which defines the position of coordinates and axes-conceived as numerical quantities - on a plane in space. Yet with Descartes’ stress on abstraction, the grid’s association with the world of outer appearances loosens. As the rules elaborated in the Discourse made clear, appearances are suspect, and a problem (or, in visual terms, a field) is to be divided into its smallest component parts
20-21
The grid thus comes to represent not only the structural laws and principles behind physical appearance, but the process of rational thinking itself. So timely is this conception that, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the concepts of Nature and Reason achieved the status of leading ideas and came to be used interchangeably. Signs of this reciprocity are evident, for example, in the application of the Cartesian grid to the exterior landscape, as in the case of the great French geometrical gardens. (...) The grid, which invades and integrates itself into the figure’s very gestures, signifies the rational, impersonal, and inevitable character of natural law, which deterministically controls the structure of the material world and of events within that world. Indeed, the main theme of David’s painting is the syllogistic inevitability of Socrates’s death by his own hand as a consequence of his rigid adherence to the laws of rational thought and logically determined behavior.
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24-25
SWISS INFLUENCES
Switzerland’s conditions for a new grid.
The typographic grid come to be associated with Swiss graphic design. Rightly so. In Switzerland, three influences were at work - influences specifically Swiss. First, three of the most active personalities in design... These artist designers were Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse and Karl Gerstner.
Second, in the Swiss Werkbund, architects were by far the largest professional group. The magazine, Das Werk, was the journal not only of the Werkbund, but of the Swiss Architects Association. This contributed to a shared outlook. And Swiss architects had been pressing since the 1920s for the rationalization and standardization of the trade catalogues of building components and fittings wich formed part of their everyday working lives.
Das Werk, swiss magazine (Composition utilizing both sample cover and sample spread)
The third factor was the use of three-column text pages, to deal with both Swiss three-language publications (German, French and Italian) and for the documents produced by the international organisations with homes in Switzerland (Red Cross, United Nations).
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Unkown Location, aruchitecture by Walter Gropius (Page 26 Composition); Bernau school exterior by Hannes Meyer (Page 27 Composition)
GRID STANDARDIZATION Modular structure and norms of functionallity.
Within the Modern Movement in Europe in the twentieth century, between the two World Wars, progressive architecture and graphic design were closely related. But the concept of standardization, of the repetition and combination of standard size elements, was a special concern. In building, as in typography, this was a matter of organizing machine-produced parts: in architecture of joining those parts, and in printing of fitting them together (individual letters in a word) but more often of separating them (words, lines columns and pages). In building, there is a structural member or a joint. In print, there is a white space.
GRID STANDARDIZATION
28-29
Mies was the third director of the Bauhaus. His two predecessors, Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer, were architects with an interest in industrialised building. Yet the school showed no equivalent concern with the inherent mathematics of Modernist typography, in spite of his concern with proportions and type area, seems unaware of horizontal divisions of the type area and indifferent to the problems of organizing text and image – apart from posters.
Catalogue of Patterns, publication by Herbert Bayer (Composition utilizing cover and spread)
The former Bauhaus student and teacher Herbert Bayer produced an early example of the Modernist use of a grid. In a square catalogue, Bayer used two columns and divided the square vertically and horizontally with a space. This already gave the possibilities, sticking strictly to filling the areas provided by a grid, of one, two, three or four square pictures; of one or two horizontal or one or two vertical pictures; and of filling the whole area. Already this gives a decent number of possibilities. Dividing the area twice shows a huge increase in the variety of positions but, because the origin is a square, the proportions of the images are only multiples of squares.
The Bauhaus founder Gropius later demonstrated the principles of the standardization necessary for prefabricated construction by illustrating the Japanese system of tatami mats – a grid-like system of modular units with a separating space.
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BROCKMANN
The grid utilization by the swiss school designers.
Grid Systems in graphic design, publication by Muller Brockmann (Composition with cover)
The grid is used by the typographer, graphic designer, photographer and exhibition designer for solving visual problems in two and three dimensions. The graphic designer and typographer use it for designing press advertisements, brochures, catalogues, books, periodicals, etc., and the exhibition designer for conceiving his plan for exhibitions and show-window displays.
By arranging the surfaces and spaces in the form of the grid the designer is favourably placed to dispose his texts, photographs and diagrams in conformity with objective and functional criteria. The pictorial elements are reduced to a few formats of the same size. The size of the pictures is determined according to their importance for the subject. Information presented with clear and logically set out titles, subtitles, texts, illustrations and captions will not only be read more quickly and easily but the information will also be better understood and retained in the memory. This is a scientifically proved fact and the designer should bear it constantly in mind.
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BROCKMANN
Grid Systems in graphic design, publication by Muller Brockmann (Compostion utilizing some spreads)
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GERSTNER
The grid utilization by the swiss school designers.
Gerstner was then 25 years old and his articles plotted paths which his carreer was to follow and the landmarks he would leave - not only the ideia of ‘integral’ tipography, but advertising in general; the integration of individual designs into a ‘programme’; his repeated use of the square; his interest in the relationship between art and design; and making art more available. The layout was controlled by a grid which, with the repeated use of the square as module, became almost an obsessive element in his persuit of a ‘programme’.
In 1964 gerstner brought together his thinking on all his fields of activity on his book Programme Entwerfen ( Designing Programmes), which was translated to English four years later. This was the dawn of the electronic revolution. Computers and their programming promised a new world of creative opportunities. While Gerstners programmes provided inexhaustible freedom for layout, he subjected text to an equally compreehnsive programmatic analysis.
Untitled, grid for the periodical Capital by Karl Gerstner
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GERSTNER
Schiff nach Europa, publication by Karl Gerstner (Composition utilizing some spreads)
3
To understand the significance of the postmodern theme of a rationality or irrationality as it is reflected in the recent iconography of popular culture and design (of which the grid is part), an examination of its sources is necessary. The first major source is the antirationalist undercurrent of twentieth-century modernism. The second, more immediate, source is the movement that begins in the 1960s and continues into the present as a conscious reaction to modernism.
POST - MODERNIST GRID The (not) rational grid concept.
Untitled, change of adress card by Dan Friedman (Full Composition)
The modern Swiss grid enjoyed its heyday during the decade of the 1960s. But during the 1970s a number of graphic designers began to overthrow the conventions of modernist graphics and use the grid to new ends.
40-41
In addition to the early twentieth-century concept of the field as a rational network of predictable mechanistic laws regulating physical reality (e.g., the universal field of de Stijl), there was a notion of the field as a far less determinate set of forces. The original notion of a “field” was put forth in the mid-nineteenth century by the English scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday explained how atoms and molecules, with so much space surrounding them, were held in spatial extension by an electrically charged, tentacle-like network that spread invisibly through the earth’s matter and the space surrounding the earth (since identified as earth’s electromagnetic field).
POST-MODERNIST GRID
State Art Aid, poster by Wolfgang Weingart (Full Composition)
A similar message was presented in 1927… Heisenberg’s discovery, known in physics as the “indeterminacy principle,” revealed that beneath the predictable mechanistic laws that rule the visible world in which we live, another set of laws with no apparent order operated at the atomic level upon which, it was assumed, the world was built. The notion that reality may appear rational outside while being irrational inside had been persuasively argued even earlier by Sigmund Freud, who posited a libidinal reservoir of powerful drives and impulses operating beneath the level of a person’s conscious awareness and behavior. With Freud, the contingent twentieth-century theme of the freeing of forces that are arational or irrational and that are located beneath the normal world of outer appearance and bringing them up into the outer world, finds dramatic expression.
For the history of irrationality… 1919 marks the date when the first atom was successfully smashed. The fruit of this event was the ability to tamper with atomic structure and so release huge amounts of explosive force and deadly radiation from the level of atomic events into the world of plants, animals, and human beings, as manifest by the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. The subject of the destructive release of irrational, subphysical forces onto the physical plane became a key theme in the iconography of postwar popular culture and came to inform postmodern architectural, graphic design, and advertising iconography as well. Prior to 1960, therefore, antirationalist tendencies and traditions in twentieth-century art, scientific thought, and popular culture existed side by side with the stream of modernist rationality. It was out of the antirationalist stream which coalesced in the 1960s and early 1970s that postmodernism was to arise. During this period two concerns were expressed which played a central symbolic role in later postmodernist iconography in general and in that of the grid in particular. First, there was a conviction that surfaces were false and superficial. Second, there was an interest in and exploration of that which lay behind such surfaces. As the baby boom generation became disillusioned with the Vietnam war, big business, corrupt governmental leaders, and the capitalist value system in general, all surface phenomena (norms and conventions) were questioned, mocked, and satirized. (…)No longer did the outside have to be functionally related to the inside. Rather, superficial decoration was allowed, and the resulting contradiction or discontinuity between inside and out was itself a strong critique of the clean, rational exterior of modernist architecture.
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POST-MODERNIST GRID
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The modernist vision of a logically constructed physical reality underlaid by an equally logical set of predictable mechanistic laws was thus replaced by a postmodernist vision of outer reality as a sham underlaid by a more real but nonrational set of unpredictable forces. This love of parodying the falseness of surface appearances in art and architecture had its counterpart in the structuralist movement in French linguistics. Unlike modernism, structuralism held that surface appearances were false and that rationality was itself a surface phenomenon under which lurked a subrational self unknown to us. The structuralist attempt to demonstrate that rationality, the conscious self, and conscious speech were false fronts for irrationality was represented in postmodernist graphic design as well. The ubiquitous use of the tilted grid, evident in magazine ads, posters, television graphics, and other popular media over the last several years, also represents the arational or irrational, because the grid - as a symbol of the field of consciousness - has become disoriented in its detachment from the world, as indicated by its lack of gravitational orientation.
State Art Aid, poster by Wolfgang Weingart (Full Composition)
The threshold to the superphysical of the late medieval grid has thus been completely reversed in postmodernism. In postmodernism, the fractured surface plane acts instead as a threshold to the subphysical and subrational.
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Opernhaus Zurich , poster by Josef Müller-Brockmann (Left part of the composition); Kunstkrefit, poster byWolfgang Weingart (Right part of the composition)
DIFERENCES
Oposing the modern and post-modern grid.
The postmodernist grid no longer acted as the invisible logic “behind” the composition, but was often visually exposed and used as a subordinate decorative element. The grid was sometimes tilted and made to express antirationality and randomness. It was often coupled with other seemingly accidental marks or manually applied gestural (signature) elements, in stark contrast to the impersonal and overly rational compositions of Swiss modernism. Usually the grid was established and then violated (ignored) or fractured along with the surface plane it defined. Both grid and composition departed radically from modernism’s functionalist ethic, sometimes to the point of sacrificing the clarity, legibility, and readability of the typographic message itself by disrupting the alignment of type or by in some way obscuring the individual words and letters. Like other manifestations of postmodern culture, the grid expresses the general theme, in opposition to modernism, of antirationality and even irrationality. The most common variations on this theme (many of which, when expressed visually as in architecture or graphic design, utilize a common iconography) include the celebration of irrational or violent phenomena, often depicted as occurring behind the veil of surface appearance, or the representation of surfaces or facades as blatantly false, sometimes with the suggestion of some unknown quantity or realm concealed behind them. In contrast to the modernist tendency to openly reveal structure and purpose via functional form, these surface planes are perforated or fractured to suggest that they are thresholds at the border of a mysterious, often nonmaterial dimension.
With few apparent alterations to the basic form itself, the grid has shifted in its meaning from a threshold between physical and superphysical worlds, to a representation of the surface of the physical world and the rational cognition which beholds it, to a threshold to the submaterial world and irrationality. In each period, the grid has thus expressed a leading conception of man and world prevalent at that time.