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Making and Breaking the Grid: A Layout Design Workshop
 
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Making and Breaking the Grid: A Layout Design Workshop (Paperback)

by Timothy Samara (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £16.99
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Making and Breaking the Grid: A Layout Design Workshop + Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type (Design Briefs) + Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, and Students (Design Briefs)
Price For All Three: £33.37

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Product details

  • Paperback: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Rockport Publishers Inc.; New edition edition (29 April 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1592531253
  • ISBN-13: 978-1592531257
  • Product Dimensions: 27.2 x 22.4 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 17,160 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #2 in  Books > Art, Architecture & Photography > Design Studies > Typography
    #19 in  Books > Art, Architecture & Photography > Graphic Arts > Graphic Design
    #19 in  Books > Art, Architecture & Photography > Design Studies > Graphic Design

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Product Description

Synopsis
For designers working in every medium, layout is arguable the most basic and most important element. Effective layout is essential to communication and enables the end user to not only be drawn in with an innovative design but to digest information easily. Making and Breaking the Grid is a comprehensive layout design workshop that assumes that to effectively break the rules of grid-based design one must first understand those rules and see them applied to real-world projects. Text reveals top designers' work in process and rationale. Projects with similar characteristics are linked through a simple notational system that encourages exploration and comparison of structure ideas. Also included are historical overviews that summarise the development of layout concepts, both grid-based and non-grid based, in modern design practice.

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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars The big book of clarity and chaos, 28 Sep 2007
By Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      

What a strange publication. Divided into two sections the first explaining grid formatting with actual printed material and the second revealing how to design print without a grid.

There seems a contradiction here because the grid, used intelligently, will allow a whole range of graphic options to be presented with clarity. Some of the print examples reproduced in the first section do show this with perhaps the most useful item a grid thumbnail for each piece, unfortunately I thought it was rather too small on each spread despite being the key to explaining each format. From past experience, designing magazines, I would start work on a grid by concentrating on the text type size because it is the least flexible of all the elements on the page. This point really wasn't made enough of in the book's chapter: Grid Basics.

The reproductions show a reasonable range of design solutions, essentially print though there is an example of corporate signage. Missing are magazines (consumer or trade) timetables and the like. Without a grid this type of printed matter really wouldn't exist.

The book's contradiction, to my mind, start with the second section: 'Grid Deconstructions and Non-Grid-Based Design Projects'. The forty items shown seem to have a couple of common threads: their design is essentially arbitrary which makes them look very messy and frequently their typography (display and text) is used as a design element which makes the words unreadable. Their design is the opposite of grid stimulated creativity, in other words visual chaos.

Some of the examples are quite amazing. On page 180-181 twelve pages of a calendar are shown, totally useless as its impossible to see the days and dates. Pages 188-189 show eight spreads from a design school journal showing irregular shaped blocks of text creating a sort of collage. I doubt anyone made the effort to read any of it. What is interesting about this second section material is that so much of it comes from educational establishments. In the real world all this designer whimsy would be rejected by the client on sight of the first dummy

'Making and Breaking the Grid' is well printed with 175dpi and the layout is adequate and for a book about grids you would have thought its own grid would have been included but it is strangely missing. Overall I felt that because the contents present two opposite design ideals the book's editorial concept is rather flawed.

From my experience there is only one book that really explains it all: Muller-Brockmann's 'Grid Systems in Graphic Design' published in Switzerland and full of good solid, practical, hands-on information. This book's only purpose is creative clarity.

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