Reading on the grid
Lately I’ve been working on the syllabi for my fall courses, as I wrote yesterday. Most of my reading has been prospective texts for those courses, but I’ve also been doing a good quantity of research in support of my article “Tabling the grid,” which will be in the collection From a to <a> Jeff Rice and I are editing.
I argue that the tag <table> brought the grids of graphic design to the Web—but without the license, or mandate, depending on who you read, to break the grid. (Newspapers have long relied on the expediency and standardization afforded by grids; the position of newspaper journalism as the ur-genre of Web writing is also relevant here.) Nearly all the how-to books I’ve read, as well as more analytical and reflective pieces, all but command users of grids to appreciate when they should be violated by off-grid design elements. In “Grids: their meaning and use for federal designers,” Massimo Vignelli speaks reverently of the grid, but repeatedly cautions against its unconditional (and uninspired) use.
This property is perhaps best summarized in Timothy Samara’s Making and breaking the grid, a collection of designs which use a stunning variety of grids—and more which reject or play with grids. But I also liked Lucianne Roberts’s The designer and the grid, because it complemented a wonderful collection of grid designs with careful theoretical treatment. Reading The grid by Allen Hurlburt is helping me differentiate between grids and modules, important for my argument because I see parallels between modular design and the object-oriented methods which are possible using content management systems to generate web pages.
Interestingly, David Banash is working with the grid this summer, and we’ve planned to share notes soon.
July 31st, 2005 at 1:46 pm
Grids feature prominently in cryptography or, more precisely, steganography or semagraphy, since it’s arguably the most sophisticated way to disguise a message within what seems to be unencoded text.
July 31st, 2005 at 10:38 pm
How so? Is this because digital images are conceptualized as grids, at least for rasterized data?
August 1st, 2005 at 5:37 am
Possibly, but I’m thinking of simple analog devices such as a Cardano grille, etc. Each communicant has a regular or irregularly shaped grid that they overlay on the message. The words thus revealed are the real message. Given the number of combinations and possible shapes, it can be difficult to crack.
The resulting plaintext will usually sound stilted somehow, however.