More on the grid

Working on the syllabus for a new version of ENG 480, Computers & Writing, I came across this tidbit on A List Apart:

And this explains why there began to be, within High Modernism, and especially in the fields that happen to bear most directly on HTML–era Web design— graphic design and typography—a self-conscious scientism, a sense that “proper” design just might be reducible to something algorithmic, repeatable, predictable.

This is something you can easily enough catch a whiff of from cracking open Josef Muller-Brockmann’s seminal “Grid Systems In Graphic Design,” for example, and it’s undeniably present in such mid–century icons as Le Corbusier’s “modulor,” and Henry Dreyfuss’s The Measure Of Man.

That is, the grid.

It’s fascinating that from this moment, Greenfield goes on to differentiate those who stuck with the ethos of Müller-Brockman et al. as “designers,” and to denigrate others as (mere working-class) “stylists”:

I’m not even sure why they’d bother to call themselves designers, except that it has a vaguely contemporary sexiness to it, whereas stylist sounds like someone named Marcel you might find working at a hair salon.

For me, this misses the point entirely. Try to duplicate Carson’s subversive layouts using Dreamweaver—or with PowerPoint, for that matter. Hell, I doubt that it’s possible to duplicate the “look and feel” of Raygun on the web without extensive use of externally created graphics. If CSS was better equipped to do that—for example, if elements could be rotated and/or if elements other than rectilinear blocks could be included—the web might includes lots less of the “algorithmic, repeatable, predictable” and more of the Pepsi-can style work Greenfield laments here.

Early to mid 1990s graphic designers like Carson paid homage to earlier movements which stacked type and seemed arbitrary at the same time they toyed with the strict lines of the grid—and why not? Since full-color desktop blew wide open about that time, with scanners and printers cheap enough to allow high-quality proofing of heavily layered, experimental design, and the software supported it, it makes sense that some designers blasted away at stoic, even stultifying practices of grid design.

Yeah, I’m four years late here, but I was writing my final doctoral exam and dissertation prospectus then, k?