Grid Principles for Web Design

Adapted from Grid Principles for Web Design (New Riders)

By Khoi Vinh

The first two decades of the twentieth century, graphic design’s pivotal epoch, carried forth the legacies of what might be considered the premodern design world. Graphic works were executed largely through tradition or intuition, with emphasis placed on imitating the natural world or emulating historical but often poorly understood models of aesthetic ornamentation.

The 1920s and 1930s brought a revolutionary shift toward a rationality that directly addressed new, mechanized media. The early proponents of this so-called Modernist approach to design included El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Jan Tschichold, Paul Renner, László Moholy-Nagy, and others, most of whom practiced in Germany and many of whom taught at the famous Bauhaus school. They insisted on a new paradigm for ordering the world: form followed function, systemic thinking became an imperative, and standardization was prized. They rejected the rote emulation of natural forms and embraced instead the inherent beauty of the industrial machines that were then remaking society.

The rise of fascism in those same decades displaced many of these practitioners and their ideas, as the Bauhaus shut its doors in 1932 under the brutal hand of the Nazis. Many relocated to Switzerland, where there existed a strong affinity for their ideas, and their approach to graphic design continued to flourish. The International style, as it became known, cross-pollinated Bauhaus ideals with a complementary tradition of rigorously applied simplicity and minimalism. Central to this, of course, was the notion of grid-based design, of tapping into the inherent structure of every page to create a sense of order in every design.

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