Discuss: Thinking Outside the Grid

by Molly E. Holzschlag

31 misconceptions of the grid

grids don’t make dull webpages—designers do.

posted at 01:50 am on December 21, 2005 by russ yusupov

32 Re: Griddi no politti

>> “the constraints of Tucson’s grid do not encourage the emergence of
>> alternative neighborhoods and communities�?

> What the heck does that mean?

Perhaps it means “The city of Tucson is boring, boring, boring. Its traffic grid is boring, and nobody’s fun either. You can’t break out of the boredom because if you live there, you’re boring”.

Hey, no offense. I’ve never even heard of Tucson before today, so please Tucsonites take it lightly.

Seriously though, London’s more “esoteric” traffic map allows ~~or maybe forces~~ the formation of islands, places it’s hard to get to. And when you get islands you might also get speciation. And speciation means new things, different things. Most of the times.

posted at 04:12 am on December 21, 2005 by Adriano Varoli Piazza

33 Believe

I find this a great article, not only because reading it pushes you in a ‘new’ direction. Reading it allows you to think: “How could I (the person reading), myself, learn designing “Out of the grid”.

People who are just ‘fighting’ Molly’s message have had this thought too, I think. But for some kind of reason those people aren’t thinking about what we could only learn from this. Molly isn’t telling us that we should design with this thought, she is just philosophically sending out a message. A message that tells us, that maybe we aren’t designing layouts, but instead we are designing grids – in most cases -.

What we should do with this message, is to remember that learning new systems or creating them let’s us decide in which direction the future is heading. We have the power to feed the generations who will follow us. This is what generations before us have done to us in many ways.

Therefore trying to hold on to ‘familiar’ systems, is in a way, not letting us to think in (maybe) better directions. This will eventually hold us from getting to next level solutions and next level ideas. The true part of those who are ‘fighting’ this new direction, are telling us to slow down a bit. This thought could also be interpreted as;

“Why not use these ideas in such a controlled way that people, techniques en methods get familiar with these next level thoughts?�?

If we would only let our minds think together for best possible ideas, we would be able to create next level systems that will work. A good example is the market for mobile phones, look where that market is heading so fast. Internet should have followed this new market. The idea is like Molly describes; “and this is why I theorize, along with many others, that we’ve not yet learned to design for the web.�?. Why can’t we get the Internet to a next level?

An answer could be: “Because we are still learning.�?

Learning means like in school; learning a lot of methods and techniques to get the feeling with what you are able to do when a problem is spotted. A problem needs a solution, not a method.

Thank Molly for sharing her thoughts and wisdom. We are all learning from it. Einstein was in front of his time. I’m not comparing Molly to him, I’m only trying to say: “Wasn’t he trying to get us in a ‘new and different’ direction, and what did we learn from him?�? Answering this question would get us close to what Molly is trying to achieve.

Learn.

posted at 07:00 am on December 21, 2005 by Patrick Tehubijuluw

34 Untitled

Thanks for the aticle Molly. However I feel that the cities analogy was a bit over-stretched. Why is it more difficult to expand a grid-based city like Tucson than an irrational city like London? Surely it’d be easier?

The same would apply to grid based layouts. If the grid is designed well, then adding content should be relatively simple.

It seems to me that the main value of the article is to encourage the reader to highlight the difference betweein thinking of design as positioning boxes of content on a web-page (css), rather than dividing the page into slices and slotting content into them (tables). But the point is then one of methodology rather than actual design. That’s to say that we’re talking about how a developer would approach the task of coding the site depending upon the usage of CSS or tables rather than how the designer would lay it out in the first place.

When you try to represent this difference as one of actual layout rather than methodology, the article in my opinion loses a little credibility. The fact that the “non-grid” based designs are generally unusable experiments is symptomatic of this.

If you are indeed suggesting people abandon grid-based designs then that would be misguided. Yes, grids have a historical grounding due to the way printing orginated, but they do also make very good usability sense.

I would like to see an example of a successful corporate, content-heavy site that “breaks the grid”.

posted at 09:25 am on December 21, 2005 by Leo Pitt

35 What is a website for?

…As confining as they can seem, the grids serve their purpose still to aid legibility and navigation. Those are important things as well.

Well said. I don’t “do” arty or creative websites. I don’t write them, and I rarely have any interest in reading them. For me, the web is primarily about communication and information. When I go to a website, it’s because I want to find something out. The easier it is to navigate the site, the better for me. Maybe that makes me boring, but I think it also explains why most visitors rate my website as “very easy to use”.

It is possible to write an “outside the box” website that is easy to navigate and logical to use, but these are very rare. What you normally find, when a website has gone creative, is that you can only navigate the site down fixed pathways that don’t necessarily fit with what you find logical.

Read some of Nielsen’s articles – in particular the one about Web TV – to see how non-standard designs can cause problems for people using the site. The web now has standards, and deviating from them, so that people have to learn how to use your site, is widely recognised to be a bad idea.

posted at 11:10 am on December 21, 2005 by Stephen Down

36 Using tables

Personally, I’ve never seen anything wrong with tables – perhaps if Netscape had called them ‘grids’ they would have been more accepted? The amount of hassle I have to go through to implement multi-column layouts, footers and all the rest of it with the box-based CSS is just ridiculous.

Whether you call them tables or grids, using that model still means that you are putting form before content, which doesn’t work on a medium that has so many different representations of form. How can a web page that is designed to look a certain way be adequately rendered on a PDA, or text terminal, or by a voice synthesiser? It can’t. Design for the web, and then wrap the layout and style around it, as appropriate to each medium in turn.

The key problems with using tables to lay out the page are:

it can confuse non-graphical browsers and those using assistive technology, and can render badly in different situations
it uses a lot more markup to achieve the same effect
it is inflexible, and makes it a lot more difficult to edit a page if you need to

search engines cannot as reliable analyse the page.

The problem is that CSS doesn’t give the support it should do for multi-columnar layouts, and that different browsers implement it in different ways. For most designs, these are easy enough to work round – and the result will be a lot more usable than a site written as nested tables.

posted at 11:21 am on December 21, 2005 by Stephen Down

37 Has the grid gone?

Compare some of the designs on showcase sites like screenspire.com with older sites. The grid has often either disappeared or has been so buried as to be unrecognizable.

Looking at most of the sites on screenspire , I would say the grid is still alive and very well. OK, so they have more graphics and that, but there are very few that couldn’t be cobbled together with tables and row/col-spans if you were desperate. Yes, they may be more free-flowing and liquid than older layouts, but they are still mostly grid-based.

Which is not altogether surprising, as drawing text in anything than rectangles is kinda tricky!

posted at 11:56 am on December 21, 2005 by Stephen Down

38 Fantastic

What a great article. I am very much a beginner with CSS, but this has opened my mind and my eyes to the possibilities.

posted at 12:37 pm on December 21, 2005 by Mirty Twelve

39 Untitled

A lot of these comments make me depressed! The grid is ancient and wonderful, but it’s certainly not the only core idea to design. Layouts without ties to the grid are still rooted in good design; scale, relative position, color, pace, etc are all crucial and interesting elements to work with even if they aren’t tied to a grid. Some folks need to loosen up and acknowledge the power of visual interest and beauty. Not everything has to be this ultra-utilitarian and oh-so-straightforward information communication.

The problem with all this boring design isn’t related to grids, it’s a lack of design personality. Everyone is trying to be this anonymous designer, leaving writing and photography with heart and personality feeling dull and lifeless because they strive to remove any aspect of personal expression. You’re a unique human with personality, design like one!

There’s tremendous merit to imbuing your personality in design, it humanizes information and makes it interesting, personal and unique. Please stop with the faceless and sterile design.

And this post isn’t about personal expression as art and art vs design, that’s a tired conversation. Design could gain some personality and power from art; art could gain some organization and utility from design.

posted at 02:15 pm on December 21, 2005 by Dave Rau