Grids in Webdesign – Critical Essay
“Grid systems can facilitate creativity by providing a framework and already answer some designers’ questions such as ‘where should the folios go’, ‘how wide should the measure be?’ etc. A well designed grid system will go some way to answer these questions and more.”
— MARK BOULTON
Grids have been a tool for ordering graphical elements in the works of graphic designers for quite some time now. They have managed to ease the work of a designer by introducing structure and order on the canvas. You might think that this may be constraining to once creativity by putting it under the tyranny of a fixed net of horizontal and vertical lines. However this is far from the truth. Grids are all about mathematical ratios - how big is one column with respect to the other column? May those proportions be formed by whole rational number (1:2, 2:3, 3:4) or may be some irrational ratios such as the Golden Section (1:1.618). What makes them ideal is not that they are mathematically accurate, but their unexpected commonness. Those ratios surround us in our everyday life from the buildings we create to nature itself. People subconsciously are used to seeing those ratios everywhere and whenever something does not fall into the "known" ratios we feel like something is wrong with it without actually knowing what the reason is. The person quickly discards the oddity and gets on with his life. The same principles apply in web design as well, only here you cannot afford to have a user irritated because of the irregularity you might have introduced by not using a grid system. Only recently grids have been introduced to the word of web design and they have changed our workflow for the better. (An simple example of web grid system)
So how are grids used in web design? Let us have an example.