Notes
Fitted Rather Than Read: Bureaucracy and Universality in the Grid System is the Unit 2 written submission. It follows one question through two studio projects, Timetable and Out of the Picture, and three close readings: Robin Kinross, “The rhetoric of neutrality” (1985); Josef Müller-Brockmann, Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981); and Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge (2014).
Question: which elements in the design language of the grid system itself embody bureaucracy, and which leave room for the designer’s discretion?
By “the grid” the writing means the modular grid of postwar Swiss typography that Müller-Brockmann codified, which has come to stand in for the grid in general. It is drawn before a single word is placed, taught as a foundation, and now built into the software designers use every day; because it is planned before anything is filled in, it disappears once the page is finished.
Structure
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Context and positioning — the modernist grid and the claim to neutrality; information as something produced; conditions and execution; bureaucracy, legibility and recognition; dialogues
- 3. Critical case studies — Kinross (1985); Müller-Brockmann (1981); planning before filling: Gitelman (2014)
- 4. Synthesis