VISC202

Grid: a way to communicate a coherent message using pictures, fields of text, headlines, and or tabular data. They can be rigorous and mechanical, or organic and loose. A grid consists of a distinct set of alignment-bases relationships that serves as a guide for distributing elements across a format. 

Benefits and uses of the grid: Clarity, Efficiency, Economy, and Continuity. A grid introduces systematic order to a layout and helps distinguish specific types of information and eases a user's navigation through them.

Modular Grid: A grid system using columns and rows.

Margins: the negative spaces between the format edge and the content, which surround and define the life area where type and images will be arranged. 

Columns: vertical alignments of type that create horizontal divisions between the margins. There can be all numbers and sizes.

Grid Modules: individual units of space separates by regular intervals that, when repeated across the page format, create columns and rows.

Flowlines: alignments that break the space into horizontal bands. Flowlines help guide the eye across the format and can be used to impose additional stopping and starting points for text or images.

Gutter: the middle of two pages.

Hierarchy: based on the importance the designer assigns to each part of the text, allows the viewer to enter the typographic space and navigate it.

Typographic Color: changes in weight, texture or value, and rhythm.

Ways to achieve a clear hierarchy: manipulating the spaces around and between test, treating contrast carefully, and changing the typographic color of the element.