Design Production, Brief 3 - Canons of Page Construction Workshop 2 - OUGD504

This was our second workshop into 'Canons of Page Construction'. In the session we began looking into more designers who have constructed grids such as Muller-Brockmann, Tschichold and Vignelli. I found these much easier to follow as apposed to the Van De Graaf canons we were looking at in the previous session. 

Grid Fields - The use of columns and grids is a common consistency in modernist approaches to page layouts.

Brockmann's Approach

Brockmann tends to be able to have a lot of creative decisions with his grids, while still maintaining mathematical decisions with his approach. 

How we will do it…

- Determine type area (Van De Graaf).

- Divide into two (or more) columns, separate columns, with an intervening gutter.

- Divide text columns into two, three or more fields.

- Determine type size and leading.

- Insert 'empty lines'. Field lines must be separated in order to accommodate gaps between images - separate fields lines (must be same width as 1 line of type and leading).

- Each field should contain a number of lines of type while each empty line should be able to contain a single line of type. Images placed on the adjacent column will perfectly align with the type as will the image captions.

'Intervening gutter should not be any wider than the point size of the type and leading. Each field needs to contain the correct amount of lines, determining the gutter is difficult for this reason.'

I have re-created Muller-Brockmann's grid to get an idea of how this is able to be used:

The next task was to use the book and newspapers layouts we were told to bring in. We needed to think about how a grid will have been used in these layouts or not. I started by looking at a semiotics book, due to the structure I thought it would be similar to the Van De Graaf canon. I feel this was the case, however they have just developed on this further as it is not an exact fit with the canon:

I looked into some newspaper articles which seems to not work with a consistent grid. This one below seemed to have no body copy aligned, however there was certain elements such as type boxes and imagery that aligned up. For this reason I feel there would be a muli-column gird going on here:

These two pages below seemed to have a more obvious grid system going on. The columns and gutters were the same width, which made the pages more consistent:

Looking at these types of grids have given me a better understanding of canons and grid-systems. I feel the more flexible a grid, the more effective a design will be. I am going to take this new found knowledge and try and apply it to my web designs.