Grid Systems in Graphic Design

What Hacker News says

1. vitafloFeb 2023
   >In the years I spent studying design and typography in art college later on, I never once heard anyone mention this rule. But it is the very first thing I bring up with designers I hire.

   This is interesting because when I was in design school we had entire courses on Swiss grid systems. "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" by Josef Müller was like the holy bible.

   That said there are a lot of design peers that I've worked with that were either never taught or simply ignore this. I wonder if it's a generational thing and simply not taught anymore (I went to design school in the mid-90's).

   Of course one downfall of having worked with various grid systems for so long is I can tell when something is off by one pixel and then cannot unsee it.

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2. ibn_khaldunMar 2021
   I appreciate how the author emphasizes attention much like how Josef Muller-Brockmann emphasizes space in his Grid Systems in Graphic Design. Typefaces are strange. Choosing the right one sometimes feels like a battle that's a part of the greater war that is fashioning content in a way that is tasteful and wise.
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3. rangibabyFeb 2019
   > high information density can look crappy at first but once you get used to it, is a better experience.

   TL;DR

   Your app should have the information density that it needs to be:

   1. Useful and 2. Help the user avoid operating the app in a way that they don't intend to or is dangerous

   Looking fancy is a secondary concern to good function. Typography has an important function because it is how you convey information to your user. Poorly laid out or written text can cause your user to get tired or use your app wrong.

   Of course, making a useful interface is a difficult and long job. It is also thankless work, because if you do a good job your users will use your app without even noticing how well designed it is (good design is invisible!).

   It's much easier to slap a pretty facade on your poorly designed app and call it done. People will be impressed by it, but struggle to use it.

   I would recommend finding physical copies of Josef Mueller Brockmann's books, especially "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" and "The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems". They are both old (pre-DTP) but have great basic advice about how to design pages.

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4. brailsafeApr 2018
   Don't Make Me Think be Steve Krugg,Grid systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller Brockman, Designing with Grids by Mark Boulton, Any of Ellen Lupton's Type Design books. All light reads except Josef's.
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5. GuiAFeb 2018
   You are being downvoted, but are asking the right questions.

   I learned the fundamentals of graphic design through print design, as that is a medium that designers have worked with for much longer than the computer screen. A lot of designers approach print design by starting with a grid that describes how their content will be laid out, and proceed from there. Of course, you can find exceptions to this (although in many cases they will be an example of a designer breaking the rules because they know them so well), but most design students will be familiar with that approach.

   "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" (1981) is one of the reference texts on this subject, if you're interested in getting deeper.

   The other commenters say, in reply to your question, that it was just for formatting HTML, and for web documents rather than applications. That is just completely missing the point - print documents are documents too, not applications. The main argument that the web is so different from print because the canvas is infinite doesn't make much sense either - even if the canvas is conceptually infinite, it still renders on a finite surface (your screen), and one can design modular grid systems that easily accommodate that (as well as the other related concerns, like the user not having the right font installed, or different pixel densities/aspect ratios, etc.).

   In the end, the best explanation seems to be that the CSS spec was never led by actual designers who could envision the sort of problems that one would face when designing documents for the web. The CSS spec committee is full of very hard working, smart people, but they have the concerns of engineers first - browser compatibility, rendering complexity, etc. - rather than designers.

   The fact that the "holy grail of web design"[0] is a thing is absolutely mind blowing to me. This is the kind of design any first semester design student would execute, and any styling language that does not let you implement it in 10 lines is a styling language resolutely not designed by (or for) designers.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design)

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6. rangibabyOct 2017
   Josef Muller-Brockmann's books are a decent primer on the basics of graphic design (including typography). They are old but the information in them is not necessarily out of date, and the writing style is very helpful since he includes examples and explanations of how to apply the concepts practically.

   If you are going to read them I would recommend "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" and "The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems". "History of the Poster" is worth getting too. Make sure to get them as books, not PDFs. His lessons about margins and font size make a lot more sense when you are viewing them in the book laid out according to his own principles.

   /edit The Vignelli Canon is a nice read too. See: http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf

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