JOSEF MÜLLER-BROCKMANN Grid Systems in Graphic Design: A visual communication manual for graphic designers, typographers and three dimensional designers. Reviewed by Tom Patterson
Grid Systems has style. It also shows us that among the many joys of reading there is the pleasure of book design.
You should judge a design book by its cover. If a book claims to know how to present, then it needs to present. So at first glance, this one doesn’t look much good. A background of Dutch orange with a mesh of fine white lines on which the title has been set in a sans-serif font. Perhaps it’s handsome in a spare way, but there is no great image or pithy review to draw the reader in. No clue as to why, at 37 years old, and on a niche subject, it has been reprinted ten times.
If the cover isn’t compelling, it is informative. Those white lines illustrate the book’s argument: aligning images and text to a grid of pleasing geometry gives a page a pleasing form. What’s more, with this guide, it gives the designer:
… the will to systemise, to clarify
the will to penetrate to the essentials, to concentrate …
the will to rationalize the creative and technical production process …
In art, rules aid creativity. Poets write sonnets. Photographers shoot in black and white. There’s no talking in opera. No brass in a string quartet. On one level, art movements are just groups of rules: modernism, impressionism, minimalism, maximalism, new-wave funk. So, in this way, the guidelines in Grid Systems make sense.
They also make sense because the grid system is simply and well described, it doesn’t take long for the uninitiated to see the patterns of design that Müller-Brockmann favours. The classic Penguin paperbacks are a good example; a block of colour broken by a bar of white, and bold text. Here the grid is well used and a row of Penguins sits smartly on the bookshelf. The back cover, on the other hand, is a mess. Six font combinations and a haphazard order of information make it unsatisfying to look at and hard to understand. The grid is still applied, but poorly. One of the dangers of reading Grid Systems is that you can quickly become a monster of style.
Most of us don’t follow a grid when we write. We use a word processor that uses a single square inside an A4 page. We’re so used to doing it this way that we have forgotten how strange it is. Jack Kerouac’s method of using a continuous scroll of paper so he wouldn’t have to pause for a new page made On the Road as famous for its method as it was for its content. But that’s how we all write now; by the time we finish a page, another appears as if by magic.
This is fine for fiction, but most of us don’t write fiction. We write reports, emails, and presentations that combine words, images, diagrams, tables, and charts. These elements need to work together on the page for our message to be clear, and this is hard to achieve with the continuous run of text that a word processor provides. It’s one of this book’s sly lessons; sometimes good prose is not enough.
Grid Systems also shows us that design doesn’t have to be flashy to be brilliant. The text is almost entirely written in the same font, with little variation in size or emphasis. Titles are found in regular places, as are names, images and page numbers. The application of the grid in this way means that a reader has more clues for finding information:
The white space between the text and the title distinguishes it from an ordinary line of text and makes it conspicuous and significant. This solution is elegant, restrained, and yet self-assured.
Perhaps we can forgive Müller-Brockmann when he doesn’t show the same restraint with his prose as he does with his layout. Often he writes with the conviction and force of a lay preacher. That’s not to say that his logic is muddied by faith, it’s just that sometimes he can overreach:
A sensitive interplay between good type design, type size, regular spacing between letters and words and open leading can make the formal pattern of a poem into an artistic event.
Why read a design book that’s nearly 40 years old? Because it takes time to see through fashion to reveal style. And Grid Systems has style. It also shows us that among the many joys of reading there is the pleasure of book design. The abstract forms of letters blocked into columns of paragraphs. The beauty of symmetry. How order aids understanding. All this achieved with a few simple lines. The grid. There, but unseen, guiding everything.
Josef Müller-Brockmann Grid Systems In Graphic Design: A visual communication manual for graphic designers, typographers and three dimensional designers Niggli Verlag 1999 (first published 1981) HB 176pp $80.00
Tom Patterson lives in Sydney. He also writes for Neighbourhood.
You can buy Grid Systems from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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