Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2005/06 - Gruppe 10 - Aufgabe 1 - Grid Based Layout

Definitions

• As in mathematics, the Layout-Grid can be definded as a set of regular lines, crossing eachother and therefore buildung a set of regular, consistent fields. Freely translated from the Original German by [Shea and Holzschlag, 2005], [1]

Origin and Problems of Grid Based Layout

Grid Based Layout is not a new design principle. This section describes the history of this layout and addresses the problems it has, beeing transported to other than print media.

History

Grid Based Layout has it's roots in the printmedia. If you look into any newspaper or magazine you will find a very good example of a Grid Based Layout. Historically seen this Layout exists since the designs of Mondrian and Le Corbusier in the 1920s to 1940s. The Layout was then adopted in Switzerland after the World War II and spread throughout the whole world in the 1950s and 1960s. Today Grid Based Layout is ubiquitous in commercial publications and a lot of Software was developed to support this technique. For example QuarkXPress as the print industry standard, but also Adobe Page Maker and Microsoft Publisher, which are more commonly used for desktop publishing. [Charles Jacobs et al., 2003]

Other Media

When trying to transport the Grid Based Layout to new media, like the internet with it's homepages, the main problem is, that the designer can not take the fixed layout from the print media, because he has to deal with different resolutions. So he generally has the choice between the nice formatted version of the article - which is formatted for one specific page size - on the one hand, and a verison that flows much better on the screen, but for which all of the beautiful Grid Based Layout is lost. [Charles Jacobs et al., 2003]

Examples

Bibliography

[Shea and Holzschlag, 2005] Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag. Zen und die Kunst des CSS-Designs. Addison-Wesley, Munich, Germany, 2005. page 138.

[Charles Jacobs et al., 2003] Charles Jacobs, Wilmot Lee, Evan Schrier, David Bargeron, David Salesin. Adaptive grid-based document layout. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Volume 22 , Issue 3, Special issue: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2003:838 - 847, July 2003

Footnotes

[1]

Wie in der Mathematik handelt es sich bei einem Layoutraster einfach um eine Reihe gleichmäßig verteilter, sich kreuzender Linien, die eine Reihe von logischen, entsprechend konsistenten Feldern bilden.

Shea and Holzman, 2005