Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

by Timothy Samara (Author) "The history of the grid's development is convoluted and complex..." (more)
Key Phrases: manuscript grid, exhibit comparisons, modular grid, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Without a clear, balanced layout, even the most interesting information is likely to be ignored. But balance doesn’t have to mean boring, as cutting-edge designers are showing with exciting new deconstructionist looks.

Making and Breaking the Grid is both a practical workshop in traditional layout design and a bold and inspirational guide to breaking the rules. In the first part of the book, designers learn the basics of working with layout grids for all types of projects, including advertisements, books, posters, and invitations. Once they’ve mastered that process, the fun begins—and the second part of the book shows how to deconstruct the grid to create edgier, more interesting work.

Bringing the common yet critical element of layout to new levels of innovation, this much-needed book gives designers the license and the means to break away from convention and create work that is unique and fresh—yet effective and user-friendly.

Timothy Samara is a graphic designer living and working in New York City, where he is a principal of SamaraLee Communication Design. He teaches typography and visual communication at the School of Visual Arts, in New York City.

About the Author
Timothy Samara is a graphic designer and educator based in New York City, where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology. He's also the author of Typography Workbook (Rockport 2004). He lives in New York's Chelsea district.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Rockport Publishers; illustrated edition edition (February 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564968936
• ISBN-13: 978-1564968937
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 9.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #330,317 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely helpful, December 15, 2004

By	Andriy Konstantynov (Kyiv, Ukraine) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My friend designer bought this book couple of months ago. Suddenly I noticed that I can't help myself looking into that book again and again. So, despite having it not far away, I decided to buy another instance for myself.
The book covers the grid theory and usage almost perfectly. If you're engaged in brochure or booklet design, you'll find this book full of ideas and extremely helpful, no matter whether you just start with it or you have been practicing brochure design for years.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The big book of clarity and chaos, July 21, 2007

By	Robin Benson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop (Paperback)

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 (go to the book's site to see some spreads I've uploaded) published in Switzerland and full of good solid, practical, hands-on information. This book's only purpose is creative clarity.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great book on handling type and layout, January 11, 2005

By	D. Eglinski (Edmonton, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a developed look at handling type and page (surface) layout in a simple-yet-abstract way. Using grids and ideas presented in this book (with some practise), the learning designer can begin to utilise elements once thought as simple and static in ways which add dynamism to your layouts.

For a designer such as myself, a fan of Swiss and Bauhaus, simplicity, directness, Making and Breaking the Grid is a book full of idea and potential. Although not radical per se, it is a concise look at one of the most powerful aspects of communication design out there, in my opinion. Definitely worth a look.