Karl Gerstner – The Complex Grid
Pedro Monteiro from What Type Blog just informed he just posted a very interesting article about the grid designed by Karl Gerstner for CAPITAL magazine.
Here is the introduction:
Karl Gerstner designed this grid for his work on the CAPITAL magazine. This is actually a six-column grid with a four-column grid superimposed. Karl suggests that this grid requires considerable study, and a designer would have to spend a great deal of time working with it before he could make free use of it in a creative sense.
In Gerstner’s grid, he accomplished a system that allowed for 6, 4, 3 and 2 columns with an added option of the unusual 5 column layout. In order to achieve this the number of division in one layout there must be 59 lines, which I find too restraining. In that sense I’ve left the five columns outside the construction of the grid that I’m going to explain.
I believe that the effort that goes into making such a grid is really worth it. I hope that you will share this opinion by the end of this article.
So, what we want to achieve is a layout that is divided in 2, 3, 4 and 6 columns and has the same horizontal divisions. You can either make these divisions for the page of your layout or for the type area. The gutter of the different columns is going to be exactly the same as the leading. The document grid is also going to fit in every division of the layout.
In the real world, often you can’t choose the size of the page your document is going to use, so I’ll show you the entire math that you must do to build a Complex Grid on a page that is given to you. For this example let’s choose an A4 page size.
Grid based design in print magazine or actual news print can be extremely complicated. Although the simple grid based layouts are the ones that attract me the most. Don’t know why.