Skip to content

Layout & composition · Grid systems

Modular grid

Fields defined by rows and columns; every element snaps to modules.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under layout & composition: how is the picture plane organised?

styles make it: 80
as a defining choice: 18
as a usual one: 31
now and then: 31
avoid it: 94

Styles defined by it 18

For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.

Andean Woven Graphic Systemsc. 600–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe graphic systems of Andean cloth, the region's most prestigious medium, in which every motif is built on the warp-and-weft grid.
Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)c. 960–present · East AsiaThe page and letter of the East Asian book.
Square Kufic (Bannāʾī)c. 1100–present · Middle East & North Africa, South AsiaSquare Kufic builds Arabic script on a square grid: straight lines and right angles only, with every stroke as wide as the gap beside it.
Adinkra & Kente Symbol Systems1700–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe Akan textile languages of Ghana.
Pacific Barkcloth (Tapa) Design1700–present · OceaniaBarkcloth beaten from paper-mulberry inner bark and decorated across Polynesia and Fiji for gift exchange at weddings, funerals and chiefly investitures.
Chaekgeori & Minhwa Screen Painting1776–present · East AsiaKorean painted folding screens of the late Joseon period.
Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)1887–present · Latin America & Caribbean, North AmericaThe picture deck of Mexico's lotería, a bingo-like game of chance.
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance)1947–present · Southern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America & CaribbeanThe photo-romance of the Italian women's weeklies: a melodrama told in staged photographs, first printed by Il mio sogno and Bolero Film in May 1947 and copied from France to Brazil.
Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics)1948–present · Southern EuropeThe house format of Milan's Bonelli publishing house and its imitators (Tex, Zagor, Dylan Dog, Nathan Never): monthly newsstand paperbacks of 16 x 21 cm with about a hundred black-and-white pages, each a long episode of a serial hero.
International Typographic Style1950–1975 · Central EuropeA post-war refinement of the New Typography in which the mathematical grid, objective photography and neo-grotesque sans-serifs were used to communicate with clarity and neutrality.
West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs1950–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaHand-painted boards advertising barbershops and braiding salons across West and Central Africa, made by self-taught, often anonymous sign painters since the mid-20th century.
Zagreb Modernist Graphics (EXAT 51 to Teatar &TD)1951–1975 · Southern Europe, Central EuropeZagreb graphic design grown from the EXAT 51 manifesto (1951), which tied abstract art to visual communication.
HfG Ulm Systematic Design1953–1968 · Central EuropeThe Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (1953–1968) was founded as the successor to the Bauhaus.
Total Design & Dutch Functionalism1963–1990 · Western EuropeThe Dutch strand of systematic modernism took shape when Wim Crouwel, Benno Wissing, Friso Kramer and Paul and Dick Schwarz founded Total Design in Amsterdam in 1963 as the country's first multidisciplinary studio.
Munich 1972 Olympic Design (Otl Aicher)1966–1972 · Central EuropeThe visual programme Otl Aicher's department made for the 1972 Munich Olympics, the 'cheerful Games' meant to show a democratic, modest West Germany.
Bitmap & Pixel Graphics1977–1995 · North America, East AsiaGraphics and lettering built from the square pixels of low-resolution screens (arcade and console sprites, home-computer displays and the first graphical user interfaces), where every dot was placed by hand within tight limits of memory, resolution and palette.
Neo-Swiss Revival2005–present · Global / networked, Central Europe, Western EuropeA contemporary revival of the International Typographic Style, fuelled by digital re-releases of neo-grotesques and by studios such as Experimental Jetset and Norm: modular grids, flush-left grotesque type, huge tightly set headlines and flat fields of black, white and one signal colour.
Material Design2014–present · North America, Global / networkedGoogle's design system, launched in 2014, which reintroduced controlled depth to flat design through the metaphor of 'material': sheets of digital paper and ink that sit at defined elevations, cast consistent shadows and move with meaningful motion.

Styles that often use it 31

A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.

Styles that use it now and then 31

An occasional choice in these styles.

It often goes with

Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.

Rational & objectivein 39 of 80
Rectilinearin 46 of 80
Icons & pictogramsin 31 of 80
Pictogramin 32 of 80
Ornament-freein 36 of 80
Geometric primitivesin 44 of 80

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in layout & composition