The Grid has endured despite attacks by post-modern ideologues, because it is a foundational principle of effective design for communication.
The grid has been central to how we structure visual communication. From the Middle Ages through to today’s digitised world it has been a defining feature in how we communicate. How written language has been organised in western civilisations has followed a familiar, measured logic throughout the ages. Clarity in composition was an important means through which civilisations emerged, developed and expanded. In the modern age too, this visual extension of man would reflect the same logic that governed other aspects of socio-economic life.
To give order to emerging mass societies in Europe and the US, great cities were designed based on the grid, as were industrial factories, housing projects and transport systems. New modes of communication too, took to the grid like a new-born takes to air.
But the grid, as we know it today in typo/graphic design, really came of age at the turn of the twentieth century, as our world and how we understood it, became dominated by the machine. How we lived, worked, built and communicated, as a rapidly growing mass society, in huge industrial centres, demanded a rational and purposeful approach to resources and how they were utilised and realised.
But it was the theorisation of the grid by modern design practitioners and thinkers that cemented the grid as a foundational value for the new discipline of graphic design. The ordered simplicity of a rational and structured approach to designing communications offered the practice of graphic design an authority that would expand the reach of the discipline throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The success of the grid is apparent in even a cursory glance through graphic design history.
Further, the grid has prevailed as a foundational approach to graphic communication, despite a new and committed cadre of anti-modern detractors from the 1960s onward. This new generation of designers held the modern approach (of which the grid was central) responsible for everything from war, over-consumption, media manipulation, social inequalities, poverty and planetary destruction. Design heroes were cast as apologists and willing participants in the forward march of unrestrained capitalism.
Values that were central to the practice of modern design were a belief in the audience as active participants; the role of the designer as a ‘mediator’ in the service of that audience; and the notion, that ‘content is king’, were all being called into question. For the anti-modernists, the idea of the ‘neutral’ or ‘independent’ designer was both a lie and the problem.
An important and symbolic event that took place in designland, that epitomised this growing turn against the modern approach to design, occurred in Amsterdam, Holland in 1972. Two influential and ideologically opposed Dutch graphic design practitioners, Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn, were brought together to discuss their approach to graphic design practice. Both men would slug it out in front of their peers in what would become known in Dutch design circles as The Debate*. This clash of two design titans highlighted and anticipated themes that would come to dominate the following decades in design discourse, particularly the interventions of Van Toorn. This is not to diminish the contribution made by Crouwel, but it was Van Toorn’s rejection of the designer as mediator in favour of the designer as artist, author and activist that chimed more with the counter-cultural, post-modern times.
While the debate was at times personally hostile and often wilfully obscurantist, it did nevertheless illuminate the central ideological counter positions. And although it sometimes blurred the lines at the core of the dispute, what emerged was not merely a difference of approach, but diametrically opposed views of the role of the designer.
Fundamentally Van Toorn’s was an ideological challenge to the historic role of design and the designer’s relationship with the audience. For him, the designer would contribute layers of meaning through the introduction of social and political issues into the design mix.
Over the next few decades in Europe and the US, ideological concerns external to design practice would come to dominate design discourse. Increasingly, design conferences, publications and post-graduate design courses would focus on the notion of the ‘Ethical Designer’, ‘Citizen Designer’, ’Social Designer’, ‘Sustainable Designer’ - the designer as ‘Activist’. Today even the casual reader of design publications can easily identify those designers who now see themselves and their role more as social and moral engineers than design engineers. It is a sad illustration of the widespread influence of this new elitist ideology.
The new elites of designland have, over a 50-year period, been more interested in politics than design. Their search for a new authority for design has found its terminus in the external world of political ideology, as opposed to developing a craft-based and vital discipline. Arguably, today’s new generation of designers are found to be increasingly estranged from the craft and practice of design, as the primary goal of elite design associations, art schools, design publications and criticism have turned their primary attention elsewhere.
But it is not all a one-way street. The promise of our anti-modern design elites has barely impacted on everyday design practice. Nor has it had any detrimental effect on the use and ubiquity of the grid – a truly modern triumph – in contemporary editorial design ‘Post-modern’ designers have had their moments, their ideological champions in the academy and criticism have seen to that, but while they may burn bright for a time, their ideological convictions eventually come crashing into one of the general laws of communication: universality and clarity of purpose.
But despite this entrenched ideological outlook that has been decades in the making, the enduring legacy of the grid in communication design only goes to show the limitations of post-modern thinking. The overwhelming majority of editorial designers are producing work based on the grid. Far from a restrictive constraint on the designer, many are proving that its creative possibilities are infinite.
* The Debate: The legendary contest of two giants of graphic design. A full English language translation of the transcript with supporting essays was published by The Monacelli Press, 2015
Alex Cameron (September 2022)
Originally published in the modernist print magazine, issue 44, ‘Layout’
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