Before examining designers who deliberately broke the grid, it is useful to understand the specific version of the grid they were reacting against: the multicolumn grid developed for newspapers and magazines.
This was a problem that books had never faced: how to present multiple unrelated stories, each with a different length, level of importance, and visual material, on a single page at the same time. The solution was to divide the page into narrow columns that could be combined in different configurations while still forming a coherent visual system. Standard broadsheet newspapers typically use between five and eight columns, while tabloids use between four and six. These figures are not arbitrary. Narrower columns produce shorter lines, which suit the small type sizes typically used in newspapers, usually around 8-9pt. Research by Colin Wheildon, published in Type and Layout (1995), found that body copy set in columns of 35-55 characters per line was read up to 70% more accurately than text set in wider columns. This finding directly informed the column structure used by most major newspapers throughout the twentieth century.
Magazines developed this approach further. Alexander Liberman, who joined Vogue in 1943 and later became its editorial director, built a grid system based on three columns, but allowed images to span across column boundaries to create more dynamic layouts. This technique, known as spanning, in which an element deliberately breaks the column lines to occupy one and a half or two columns, became a defining feature of magazine design. It also introduced a more conceptual innovation: treating text and images as equally weighted modules, rather than treating images as secondary elements placed wherever space allowed. This modular approach is generally recognized as a direct predecessor of the “card” layout widely used in contemporary web and app design.
If the grid functions as an agreed set of rules, then breaking it deliberately becomes its own form of communication. However, this requires a thorough understanding of the grid; without that understanding, the result is simply disorder rather than a meaningful disruption.
The Dada movement of the 1910s and 1920s was the first to use this approach systematically. Designers such as Tristan Tzara and El Lissitzky produced typographic compositions in which text appeared at irregular angles, in inconsistent sizes and weights, seemingly violating every principle of composition. Closer analysis, however, reveals an underlying structure beneath this apparent chaos. The disorder was deliberate rather than accidental, intended to generate a sense of urgency and disruption that matched the political content of the work.
This approach was revived intentionally during the 1980s and early 1990s by designers associated with the Cranbrook Academy of Art, particularly Katherine McCoy and Ed Fella. Their work, frequently described as deconstructivist, treated the grid less as a tool and more as an object of critique. Text was layered, overlapped, and fragmented, while the underlying column structure remained visible, though clearly disregarded. This work drew explicitly on Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction: the grid remained present as a kind of structural ghost, and meaning emerged from the tension between the expected order and the actual disorder presented.
David Carson, art director of Ray Gun magazine from 1992 to 1995, became the most widely recognized practitioner of this approach. In one well-known issue, he set an entire interview with the musician Bryan Ferry in Zapf Dingbats, a typeface composed entirely of symbols and therefore unreadable as text, reportedly because he considered the interview too uninteresting to merit a conventional layout. In this case, the grid was not merely altered but abandoned entirely. Notably, Ray Gun‘s circulation increased during this period, suggesting that in the right cultural context, a complete rejection of the grid can function as an effective communication strategy in its own right.
This post indicates that the grid is best understood not as a binary opposition between order and chaos, but as a stable reference point. Whether a designer constructs a rigid corporate identity or deliberately renders a page unreadable, the grid remains the structure against which both decisions are measured. The next post moves into digital design, examining how the grid was adapted for screens and, more recently, for artificial intelligence.
