Using the Grid: Homophone Project (flower/flour)
When designing a magazine, booklet, or brochure, it’s essential to know what a grid is. For people who don’t know what a grid is, it helps a designer structure the layout so it can be easy for the viewer to read. Using a grid, you can create this space where we subconsciously understand the most important thing on the page. Another purpose for a grid could be that when printing, it helps to have a gap so images or words don’t run off the page or get positioned weirdly so that the viewer can understand what they’re looking at.
As a designer, I never realized that books or textbooks follow a grid. One of the exercises for this module was to find magazines or any book to deconstruct the grid, which means that we had to trace the grid the person designing the book had used. At first, this was very difficult to understand since it often involved math to measure the margins and gutters placed throughout the layout. It finally clicked after I started doing it, and you could easily find a grid. It doesn’t have to be strictly a book dealing with design. For instance, it can be a geography textbook.
The assignment that really stuck with me for this module was when we did the natural wonder information posters. It needed to be legible and readable. The typeface needed to match the theme of what I was going for, but the reader must read it and understand the information quickly. The entire document, which includes the images and the text, must be readable and get an idea of what I want them to imagine when reading the story I created.
