Just a few days ago I received Josef Muller-Brockman's Grid Systems in Graphic Design in the mail. Muller-Brockman, for those who don't know, was, along with Armin Hoffman, among the first and most prominent designers to implement and propagate the Swiss Style (or International Style) of graphic design in the 1960s.
Having already read Willi Kunz's Typography series, I was initiated into some of the finer points of the grid system already, but Muller-Brockman's book has already hit me like a shotgun blast to the forehead. I know that there are those among us who raise their fists against the grid system for its stiffness and quasi-fascist adherence to rules and ideology, but there's a strange comfort and dare I say freedom in it for me, and also a bit of a wonder at the mathematical harmony in the way it all works. I was thinking about this last night at a Christmas Eve candlelight service.
The music for the service was a Gloria by Vivaldi performed by a chamber orchestra. Throughout the performance I was marveling at the ways in which Vivaldi's melodies and harmonies weaved through each other, separating, calling and responding, and finally joining back up, over and over again. Vivaldi accomplished all of this diversity in his music, however, within the constraints of rules and conventions. Granted, he and his contemporaries also did a lot of rule-breaking, but always with respect for what came before and in observance of what is worth keeping.
Such is the case, I've discovered, with this book. The Grid System is a thing of beauty in that it creates harmony and beauty from a set of mathematical principles and age-old conventions of layout. Like the baroque composers, there is a lot of personality and variety that can be infused into the work even when the conventions are observed; the rules and conventions themselves do not necessarily stifle creativity or vision.
A strange post for Christmas, perhaps, but there you have it.
Merry Christmas all!
