Grids allow designers to systematically impose order on layouts to create visual hierarchies and compositions that have distinct, clear and considered outlined spaces in which information can be set and communicated from. The importance of grids in editorial design in particular is significant.
Graphic designer and designer director Khoi Vinh, who worked for The New York Times newspaper from 2006 - 2010, speaks of grids as a pursuit into the dynamic between lettering and image. It is his view that grids allow for the control of how type and image interact with each other within a layout, that give an "immediate boost to aesthetic power" in a design. By using grids to construct editorial design, Vinh believes we are able to "remove subjectivity" to reveal the essential truth or core idea of the content, free of subjective feeling.
Graphic designer and designer director Khoi Vinh, who worked for The New York Times newspaper from 2006 - 2010, speaks of grids as a pursuit into the dynamic between lettering and image. It is his view that grids allow for the control of how type and image interact with each other within a layout, that give an "immediate boost to aesthetic power" in a design. By using grids to construct editorial design, Vinh believes we are able to "remove subjectivity" to reveal the essential truth or core idea of the content, free of subjective feeling.
Below I have identified the grid system exploited to create the editorial design of an article featured in The Independent newspaper, identifying how the system works for this particular article, and newspaper as a whole.
The grid used to construct the above editorial layout, created by designer Matt Willey during his 2013 redesign of The Independent (including layout and grid system), is identified in the above photographs - outlined in pencil on an A3 sheet of tracing paper.
The grid comprises of 12 columns. Bodies of text are featured across two columns of the grid at a time, with captions and additional details shown in one column only. This format provides a standardised strategy in dividing body from additional information, allowing the viewer to navigate the composition with the ease through the use of column (and type) size to instruct the gaze via the ordered hierarchy. The 12 column system also provides the composition with space for both written content and imagery to sit together harmoniously without appearing congested. This format can be adapted for any given article as a result of its versatile properties and flexible nature as a result of a large number of columns, important in editorial design in that newspaper articles can range in size and content.
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