Obey the Grid — Gabriel Solomons
Channel: TypeCon
Date: 2022-06-27

Recorded during TypeCon2016: Resound in Seattle, Washington

Grids are everywhere. From maps to architecture and city planning, grids help us to organise space and orient our place within it. Graphic design too has made effective use of grid based systems to construct form, organise information, impose hierarchy and support navigation pm – whether in the design of a typeface, on a single page, 3D environment or online interface.

Over the past five years we have been running a poster project for our level 2 BA graphic design students at UWE, Bristol which is rooted in the traditions of the International Typographic Style, a design style developed in Switzerland in the 1950s that emphasizes cleanliness, readability and objectivity. Each year we aim to tie the project in with a major national or international event (past years have focussed on the 2012 Olympics, London Underground’s 150th Anniversary and the Centenary Commemoration of World War 1) and we encourage the students to employ Swiss inspired dynamic composition, simple colour schemes and hierarchy of information using san serif typefaces, letterforms and shapes rooted in architectural structure.