#Types of grid systems in graphic design series#

But Instagram has changed graphic design forever. Rita knows social media hasn’t radically changed designers’ lives.

Despite likely finding structural opposition, she didn’t lose time, unhappy with design education in the country and a toxic system that feeds an industry that invariably invests all the time polishing and displaying the surface.

#Types of grid systems in graphic design series#

Rita González, a design lecturer from Colombia, had only been teaching for three years when a series of circumstances, and some openness from senior management, promoted her to head of department.

They are systems of oppressive deception. These are not design systems of universal validity. The illusion of universality and objectivity coming from a specific historic and geopolitical context is exported worldwide to the present day and still applied with the same conviction, or simply as eternally marketable style, with multiple reincarnations. His definition of systemic form reproduces a limited definition of democracy. In other words, Müller-Brockmann’s system of organisation of form shapes a way of thinking-a consistent formal system at the cost of difference. And for such democracy to exist, “no social agent should be able to claim any mastery of the foundation of society” (Mouffe, 2009, p. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2009) argues that a pluralist democracy should legitimise conflict, division, and antagonism. Such sweeping levelling overlooks privilege, under-representation, marginalisation, difference. By letting mathematical form define democracy as a controlling system, Müller-Brockmann strives for neutrality and a common good. One that is driven and enforced by form, rapidly reproducible and scalable, and with damaging consequences by his reductive definition of democracy. 10) He makes a case for the universal validity of grid systems, claiming that the systematic use of strict formal principles produces directness and intelligibility, which he suggests are vital in sociopolitical life. With the use of the grid as an ordering system, Müller-Brockmann argues that a “design which is objective, committed to the common weal, well composed and refined constitutes the basis of democratic behaviour.” (Müller-Brockmann, 1981, p. More than structures of organisation of form, this books shapes a mathematical, delusional and purist way of thinking. A key example of this is the influential book Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981) by Swiss designer Josef Müller-Brockmann. Branding and signage are the two other domains which nearly claim exclusivity of the use of the word ‘systems’ in relation to graphic design. When a term such as system is invoked, it is normally related to macro and micro-typography, involving book design and typesetting, but also addressing type design or parametric typefaces. Within graphic design, the concept of systems is profoundly rooted in form.