OUGD403 STUDIO BRIEF 2 - STUDY TASK 2 GRIDS

On Friday we got set an over the weekend project to research into grids to help us with producing our own grids for the typefaces we have designed. To do this I started by researching into the different type of grids that are used, such as in magazines and books, and also into some of the "rules" of drawing a grid, such as the law of thirds and perimeter edge and axial relationship, which was interesting as it got me to think about how I actually place my elements on a page.

I also started drawing my own grids for pages in books, to get an idea as to how to start drawing my own grid. 

I had to make links between the type of grid that was used, and the audience it was aimed at, as this will be important during future briefs in this course.

After drawing out many different grids for pages, I have found out that there is no one set grid for a book, generally. Or for Garamond that is, every page and most letters differ from one to another, and that's what makes it exciting and unique.

I then decided the best way to apply this to my current brief was to try and make a grid for Garamond, which I attempted, as you can see below, although I found it quite difficult, because Garamond was designed in the 1500's, it wasn't designed using a grid, so all the letters were wonky, the strokes weren't straight, and neither were the serifs, even though they looked like they were.

Attempting to make a grid for Garamond.

After choosing the one typeface that I'm going to develop further and produce the whole alphabet for, I decided to try and make a grid for that, which I also found very challenging, and couldn't get one grid to fit all the letterforms, as they are all different shapes and sizes. This was my result.

As you can see all the grids are different heights and widths and shapes, although I did find a few horizontal lines that were in the same place, so perhaps I can produce a grid that works for the whole alphabet.

After producing a series of grids, I then went on to trying to write the word "social" in lowercase letters using the grids I had created. For some letterforms this was relatively easy, such as the "i" and the "l". However, particularly for the "s" I found it quite hard to draw the "s" following the grid, so it had the same shape as the "s" I drew the grid from. My grid evidently needs work doing to it before it can be applied to the whole alphabet.

Following a bit of a class discussion on this weekend task on Monday, I found out that although I have experimented with grids, I need to do a lot more research into grid experts such as Jan Tschichold, Massimo Vignelli, Matthew Tucker and Joseph Muller Brochman, and theories such as the golden ratio and the rule of thirds, also the Fabonacci sequence and Van de Graaf, to expand my technical knowledge of grids. This further research could help me massively when trying to produce my grids for my chosen letterform again.