Grid and mood

Grid and mood. Web Designer Knowledge Base

Printed 2015-10-20

Have you ever heard the expression "square-nesting way of thinking"? That's what I'm talking about.

The grid determines how information is organized on the site, and these affect the mood that the visitor then creates. Say, if you take a four-column grid and push all the content into these columns - and do it strictly, without making any exceptions - you get a very boring, template layout. Sometimes (in a newspaper, for example) it is justified, sometimes not.

The more deviations from the strict grid you allow, the more dynamic, fresh, intriguing the site can become. If somewhere you allow elements to go beyond the boundaries of the column, somewhere combine adjacent columns into a large block, alternating the rhythm of the page, the feeling from site design will be completely different.

The extreme extent of this is the complete absence of any mesh, that is, complete chaos. If the task is to amaze, surprise with its unusualness - maybe this is what you need!

There are compromise options. For example, to make a grid not with the same column width, but with a different one. Or try unusual alignment inside the columns. As always, there are many ways, but there is only one principle - to deviate from the standard in some respects.