This spread is from Josef Müller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems in Graphic Design, in which he explains, in meticulous detail, how multicolumn and field-based grids can be used flexibly to achieve any number of different layouts, in both 2-D and 3-D work. Several post-War Swiss designers are the best-known exponents of the grid. In his work Tschichold explored subtle horizontal and vertical alignments, and used a limited range of fonts, type sizes, and type weights. It was the logical way to lay out text that is read from left to right, and produced “natural” rather than “formalist” solutions to the new design challenges than classicism, with its enforced central axis. He wrote of typographic consistency as a necessary precursor to understanding, described designers as akin to engineers, and argued compellingly for asymmetry as a central tenet of modernism. Tschichold’s work was more refined than much of that which had preceded it. He paid attention to typographic detail, experimenting with a limited typographic palette in order to achieve greater visual clarity and easily navigable pages.ĭuring the late 1920s and the 1930s, typographer Jan Tschichold set out his typographic principles in two seminal books: The New Typography (1928), and Asymmetric Typography (1935). In 1925, Herbert Bayer was appointed to run the new printing and advertising work-shop. Within an astonishingly short period of time, graphic artists were marrying analytical skills with abstract form to arrive at mass-produced designs determined as much by political idealism as by a desire for self-expression. His belief that architecture, graphic art, industrial design, painting, sculpture, and so on were all interrelated had a profound impact on the development of typography and graphic design long after the school was forced to close by the Nazis in the 1930s. The Bauhaus opened its doors in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, with the architect Walter Gropius as its Director. Designers like Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema used these principles to produce commercial advertising and publicity materials. The typographers affiliated to de Stijl wanted to apply these ideas in the real world, not just for their artistic cause.
Rosalind krauss grid plus#
Arguing that simplicity of form was accessible and democratic, its members advocated minimalism, using only rectilinear forms, and eradicating surface decoration other than as a byproduct of a limited color palette: the primaries plus black and white. The importance of this movement to the grid is that it explored form as determined by function, and placed this in a political context. In 1917 Dutch architect, designer, and painter Theo van Doesburg founded de Stijl. Here he explains the parallels between abstract art and typographic layout.ĭe Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Jan Tschichold His work was nevertheless aesthetically refined and dynamic. In it Tschichold argued that typographic consistency is a necessary precursor to understanding, and described designers as akin to engineers. This spread and throw-out is from Jan Tschichold’s seminal work Asymmetric Typography, originally published in 1935. Seems to have been deterred by that example, and modernist practice continues to As the experience of MondrianĪmply demonstrates, development is precisely what the grid resists. It is not just the sheer number of careers that have beenĭevoted to the exploration of the grid that is impressive, but the fact that neverĬould exploration have chosen less fertile ground. Production has sustained itself so relentlessly while at the same time being so Yet it is safe to say that no form within the whole of modern aesthetic Fewer and fewer voices from the general critical establishment have been raised in support, appreciation, or analysis of the contemporary plastic arts. The arts, of course, have paid dearly for this success, because the fortress they constructed on the foundation of the grid has increasingly become a ghetto. The barrier it has lowered between the arts of vision and those of language has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech. As such, the grid has done its job with striking efficiency. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse. “In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts ever since. Grids – Rosalind Krauss Grids – Rosalind Krauss