Best Practices for Graphic Designers, Grids and Page Layouts

10 Best Practices for Graphic Designers: Grids and Page Layouts

and grids are the most basic and impor-

tant tools to utilize. Putting information

in a hierarchy, groups, or columns, or

utilizing any of the many layout and grid

tools available, helps us, as graphic

designers, design in a clear and useful

way. We can embellish our designs and

make them more appealing, and therefore

draw the reader in by incorporating fonts

and colors and images. But the initial

groundwork of a solid, thoughtful layout

is the key element that holds the design

together—and makes order out

of ambiguity.

We wrote this book to be a tool to help

designers achieve their communication

goals by defining and showing how page

layouts and grids work. The design

examples, which we have carefully

selected to accompany the text, were

created by some of the best professional

graphic designers working in our industry

“Just as in nature, systems of order govern

the growth and structure of animate

and inanimate matter, so human activity

itself has, since the earliest times, been

distinguished by the quest for order… The

desire to bring order to the bewildering

confusion of appearances reflects a deep

human need.”

—Josef Müller-Brockmann,

Grid Systems in Graphic Design

As human beings, it is in our nature to

seek order when we are presented with

new information, in an attempt to sort

and classify that information quickly.

This action is paramount to our under-

standing of what is being presented.

When a graphic designer—whose primary

goal is to communicate effectively—is

faced with making the complicated easily

understood and the conceptual visually

realized, it becomes obvious that layouts

INTRODUCTION

11

today—from New York to California,

and from London to New Zealand. We

hope you will find them inspirational

and helpful.

Scattered throughout the book you

will also find a number of detailed case

studies. These case studies were written

to illuminate a specific point or technique

employed. We probed the designers a

little further to share with us some specif-

ics regarding their particular challenge

with the project they faced, the choices

and decisions they needed to consider,

the winning results that followed, and

what they learned from the experience.

For example, for one case study we inter-

viewed a designer who made the most

of his strategic decisions unknowingly,

which only exemplified the difference

between success and failure when trying

to communicate an idea as abstract as

a brand. For another, we learned from

design legend Massimo Vignelli that

following a strategic grid system has

never been a choice, but rather a principle

of any great design (and we agree).

We hope these valuable visual examples

and the more detailed behind-the-scenes

case studies will give you—as they did

us—a new appreciation for the purpose

and importance of a great page layout

and grid system.

Lastly, we hope they will also serve

to educate, inspire, and increase the

repertoire of questions, theories,

and techniques you can bring with you

to the start of your next project.