What is grid? from Wikipedia, It's said that

"a grid is a structure (usually two-dimensional) made up of a series of intersecting straight (vertical,horizontal, and angular) or curved guide lines used to structure content."

Example from some works of Kazimir Malevich. Think about Is this a grid or not? maybe I can call this is one of tool of grid. also I can say this is on the grids. 

Another example from Malevich. Shapes are using as a tool of grid. but layout is not on the grids. I like he is using grids system but at some point, he broke the rule of grids system.

Grids in Music

As John L Walters explains, the notion of the grid is not exclusive to the visual arts. Music uses time-based grids that are as central to its structure as are the grids measured in points, pixels, millimeters or inches.

There is a difference between the grids you hear and the ones you see.Conventional music scores are precise within their own rules, but can be interpreted in many ways. For a simple tune, the x-axis is time and the y-axis is pitch. The notes make up a graphic code system that shows the player which notes to play, when to play them and when to remain silent. The player follows the 'dots', reading from left to right; further graphic details prescribe the duration of each note, and hence the rhythm of the peace. Vertical bar lines divide the sequence notes into handy sections that make navigation easier. The notation must obey the grid imposed by these bar lines-the duration values within their will always add up to the amount set by the 'time signature' four crotchets for 4/4 times, six quavers for 6/8. Time signatures may change within a piece, which may also speed up or down, but the notation remains anchored to a grid.

Grids in Fine Art

The grid is among the oldest formal devices in the history of visual art. After making a successful sketch, the Old masters would draw a squared grid over their imagine in order to facilitate scaling it up, square bu square, into a painting or a fresco. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the development of perspective by pioneers such as Paolo Uccello led artists to routinely employ grids in their imagines to correctly mark out the recession of space. As such, the squared-offpicture plane was essential to the development of pictorial illusion. However, it was not until the twentieth century that the grid moved from the background to the foreground in works of art.

The grid, and geometry in general, made its returning various responses to the early twentieth-century art movement Cubism, whose exponents, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, had conceived of an aesthetic that fragmented and abstracted reality into angled planes in order to more closely approximate the way we look at things. Inspired by Cubism during a stay in Paris before the Fiest Word War, the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian wanted to create an art that was even more 'realistic' though paradoxically the works he came up with- in a style he labeled 'plastic art'- were increasingly abstract. 

At approximately the same time, in Russia Kasimir Malevich was also using the grid as the basis for a spiritual quest. His movement, Suprematism, was found 

Grids in Pop art

In the 1950s, Pop Art with its latent analysis of serial industrial production,used the form- think of Andy Warhol's silk-screened soup cans, arranged in an even grid, and RoyLichtenstein's use in his paintings of 'Ben Day' dots, found on newspaper reproductions of photographs. So did cool-eyed individualists such as Jasper Johins, who in a series of canvases arranged numbers in a painterly lattice, treating the numeric system as a ready-made subject, much as he did the American flag. But these are fleeting examples.

In the 1960s, however, grids made a big comeback. If PopArt had alluded simplicity to mechanization and ordering processes, the new movements of Minimalism and ProcessArtdid so explicitly. Works such as sculptor Donald Judd's metal cubes, seemingly untouched by human hand, fitted right into a world whose economies ran on serial production and industry. Meanwhile, the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher arranged their monochrome, frontal studies of buildings and industrial structures in close grids, emphasizing the subject'similarity and practical purpose.

Grids in Installation Art

American artist SolLeWitt, whose entire career has been devoted to the form. His fiercely rational work seems suited to the unitary form of the grid, and he has used it in three-dimensional floor pieces that stack up wooden grid-structures into boxy, diagrammatic forms, and in later paintings in which a single motif is progressively rotated through angles, the stages being presented together in grid form.

This fixation on the grid-which some have termed obsessive-also characterizes Canadian painter Agnes Martins's pale, hushed canvases, which are committed to delicate surface effects and seriality, and which create ad hoc grids through compulsive build-ups of horizontal and vertical lines. Like the work of early geometric artists, they aspire to a perfection of form, reflecting a Platonic ideal that exists inside the artist's head.

The latter are surprisingly uncommon examples of the grid bing used in sophisticated contemporary painting. It is a form eminently suited to photography, which is where it has mainly appeared. But there are other exceptions; American artist Chuck Close, for example, returned to squaring off- the artistic roots of the grid- to make his hyperrealist portraits, and since the 1980s has brought the grid itself more and more into play. In later works he has treated each area of the grid as a discrete section, filling it with swimming colors and forms that, close up, seem abstract, but from a distance reveal themselves to be elements of a larger portrait, often of Close's own face.

Grids in Conceptual Art

"The whole surface of the sea is gridded, invisibly" point out Tacit Dean, an artist whose work often focuses on the sea, and our relationship to it.

Dean uses a wide variety of media-chalk drawings on blackboards, film, sound, and even a hugely complex and specially made jukebox. "I find the content, and then the form comes from it"She says. "And most of the time it's film, but I can be anything-a CD, a photograph, a drawing or whatever"

Much of Dean's work explores the relationship between formal, manmade structures that measure time or mark space, and the unpredictable natural elements that surround them-the sea, the weather. Several of her films have focused on lighthouse has its own rotation, they are beautifully ciphered right the way up the coast. "They are all marked on maps so that you know that such and such a lighthouse has two flashers a minute."

Just as the temporal regularity of the sun rising and setting provides one way for sailors to locate themselves in an otherwise unchanging environment, so does the regularity of a lighthouse's rotating beam. Often, the films that Dean makes of these phenomena are shown as continuous-loop films, which are shown with their own temporal regularity, adding to the complex conceptual structure behind the work. "It's like concentric circles, in a way" She said, "Like circular grids"

The other, more obvious grid to consider in the context of the sea is that of latitude and longitude-again, a conceptual grid, but one that has overriding importance for navigation, and therefore safety. Sailors who could not calculate their position with any exactitude were said to be prone to time-madness, losing all sense of their spatial and temporal bearings.

Teignmouth Electron Cayman Brac by Tacit Dean 

Music cannot avoid the grid, because it is a time-based art in which repetition plays a large part. The grids of classical notation, graphic scores, computer programs, piano rolls, digital recording, optical movie soundtracks and even the stereo spiral scratch of vinyl have one thing in common; an axis that delineates the passage of time, time that moves relentlessly forward from now into the future until the music stops.

Constructivism

The new visual language and its philosophy were attracting students and designers from abroad, as well as finding sympathetic participants. Russia's political upheaval of the early 1900s found a voice in abstraction; the pure geometry of a movement called Suprematism merged with Cubism and Futurism to generate Constructivism, an expression of Russia's quest for a new order. Seeking out instruction in Germany, a young Russian Constructivism, El Lissitsky, found himself in Darmstadt studying architecture, absorbing the rationalist aesthetic that was prevalent there. His studies kept him in Western Europe throughout WorldWar I and for the duration of the Bolsheviks were fighting for domination in the poster, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, epitomizes the abstract communicative power of form and typifies the work of the Russian avant-garde from this period.

Concerete Art

The concept "concrete art", or in French, "art concret", was brought into language about art consciously in 1924 by Theo van Doesburg as the opposite of "abstract art". 
"Concrete art" does not of course mean figurative art; by the term "concrete" is meant rather an art that is not abstract in the sense that that it does not abstract or distort natural models. In this way, concrete art differentiates between abstract and immaterial art. Concrete art means much more an art that is based on lines, surfaces and colors and that for the most part follows a clear geometric principle. For this reason, important art-historical preconditions were "de Stijl" and "Bauhaus". Concrete art materializes the mental, but does not have any kind of symbolic meaning. "Painting is a means of realizing thoughts in an optical way", is how Doesburg explained it. Max Bill wrote in 1947: "The goal of concrete art is to develop objects for mental use, the same way people make objects for material use. Concrete art, as a last consequence, the pure expression of harmonious measure and law." In addition to the group, van Doesburg published the journal Art concret in 1930. Concrete art had an important influence on Colour Field Painting and on Op Art.

Theo van Doesburg Counter-Composition VI 1925

Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart Composition No. 15 1925

Bart van der Leck Composition 1918

Juan Mele

Victor Valera

After the Bauhaus

By the time the Bauhaus closed its doors in 1933, modern design was a fully developed idea. Architecture evolved into the International Style (Functionalism), and industrial design became a new art form based on the framework established in the Bauhaus workshop. In graphic design, the asymmetrical approach to page design was firmly established; typography had found a new simplicity and directness of expression; and the growing importance od advertising had been recognized by the establishment of Bauhaus courses in advertising in the late 1920s. The modern movement placed a new concentration on primary colour-red, yellow, and blue-triangle. And the designs of the Bauhaus typographers and the work of Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, and Jan Tschichold had brought a new excitement and sophistication to page layout.

The problem of the decades that followed was to assimilate these dynamic ideas into the not-always-cooperative framework of commercial communication. At first, the early movement toward a free and informal organization of the page gave away gradually to a more ordered and structured design. Then, in the 1960s, some contemporary graphic design turned back the clock. In a relatively short period, design dipped into the decorative grab bag of Art Nouveau and, later, Art Deco. On the whole, these efforts produced only fashionable and "trendy"(a word invented for this period) solutions. The few good pieces that resulted from this instant nostalgia continued to apply the dictates of simplicity and of clearly defined form inherited from the pioneer designers and typographers of the modern movements.

Meanwhile, the fine arts movement that was to answer to the name "Pop" mixed the sprit of Dada with images borrowed from the most commercial kind of graphic design, particularly in packages and advertising. Because this art was already a parody of graphic design, it had only a slight influence on contemporary communication.

Will Burtin's cover design at the right marked the end of a remarkably creative decade in American design

Swiss style

In the 1990s, Visual communication became more detailed and the wealth of material revealed the reach of Muller-Brockmann's interest in printing and typographic history. Works from early fifteenth century broadsheets, trademarks, and tarot cards... were utilized to illustrate how word and imagine form a link "between the mind and the physical world." The analysis examined how this imagine-text synthesis developed, becoming "richer and more sophisticated", and was followed by a study of the invention of photography, the poster, and how the different artistic movements of the twentieth century contributed to the development of a society based on a scientific means of production created an objective mode of visual communication. In the closing section, which attempted to preempt future developments, Muller-Brockmann claimed that, in the end, "factual knowledge and powers of judgment and discrimination based on credible information will impel advertising in the direction of objectively." Muller-Brockmann had stressed that the grid made "it possible to bring all the elements of design-type characters, photography, drawing, and color-into a formal relationship to each other; that is to say, the gris system is a means of introducing order into a design". However, even through the discussion of these ideas was supported by the grid format of `gdhdp itself, the three pages set aside to examine this important tool did not permit Muller-Brockmann to enlarge to enlarge on its range of applications, both simple and complex. As he noted, while numerous articles had appeared since the publication of his first book to address the grid, there was "no publication that showed how the grid was constructed and applied, let alone how the design of the grid system was to be learned."

Swiss typography

By the early 1940s, the revolution in visual art had changed the direction of typography. Classicism was still alive in much book design. However, display typography in advertising and publicity had been liberated by the use of contrast, dynamic movement, balance achieved through asymmetric placing of elements in space, unification of the message and its typographic expression, and the acceptance and powerful use of photography for illustration. In addition, new and more direct ways of delivering statistical and technical information were being explored, often with a strong abstract bias.

During the second World War, Switzerland was neutral and therefore continued to have contacts with protagonists from both sides.

The country became a haven for intellectual refugees, many of whom had suffered oppression under Fascism. A major strength of Swiss graphic design was the bleeding of influences from the German, French and Italian members of the population. While most European countries were either at war or were occupied, Switzerland was able to continue most peacetime activities, including design for promotional materials. cultural events and packaging.

In many ways, the refined modernism of Tschichold was very suited to the ordered lifestyle of Switzerland, where a relatively large population lived in a small land area, much of which is mountainous. Swiss industries were already highly developed and technically advanced. In the years between 1939 and 1946, the Swiss design schools and many practitioners continued to promote modern typography, building on the work of Tschichold and other refugee. Many Swiss designers, including Max Bill, Hans Erni and Celestine Patti, also had reputations as fine artists. This combination often resulted in an experimental approach to typographic layout.

Symmetry; The classic ideal

The early Mediterranean cultures of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans set a style that was firmly entrenched in formal balance. Their monolithic structures executed in stone and marble with centered entrances dictated a form balance of elements on both sides.

This dedication to classic symmetry grew out go the block-on-block construction; the enclosed space that resulted; the need for a fixed entrance; and the philosophical and religious purpose of many of the buildings. For many years, Western architecture followed  the lines laid down by Phidias, the master designer of Acropolis, and his followers. But in the sixteenth century, when the printed page was in its infancy, Andrea Palladio extended this acceptance of classic balance to an extreme in which the left and right wings of a building mirrored each other, sometimes without regard for news or function.

This architectural formalism had a profound influence on the form of inscriptions and early manuscripts that, in turn, directed the design of the printed page. If the occasional chiseled inscription or hand-rendered scroll ended up with letters that are aligned at the left with uneven margins at the right, it was more a matter of convenience than intent. The varied nature of the materials to be assembled on the printed page, the varied line lengths required by poetry and drama, the need for ornamental initials and decorative illustrations, all began to nudge at the formal foundations of early pages in type; but the primary dedication of the scholar, printers of Venice, who  to symmetrical balance. When the design moved away from its central axis, decorative borders were often employed to bring the result back to formalism. Like the walls of a classic building, they enclosed the organized the space in an unbreakable pattern.

It was not until the twentieth century that asymmetry began to be appreciated as an optional force in architectural and graphic design, but it did not diminish the importance of symmetry as a creative approach ro form. Symmetrical balance has produced page designs of rare beauty, and the esthetic conditions that inspired classic page design continue to set the pattern for a fair proportion of contemporary design.

design by Herb Lublin for Avant Garde in 1972. The design is in symmetrical balance.

Asymmetry; The oriental order 

While the Roman empire was spreading the concept of classic symmetry across the European continent, a new view of architectural form was developing in Japan. Drawn by necessity and climate to wooden framed structures instead of stone, the Japanese designed their buildings to open outward toward nature rather than inward to embrace the interior space. The result of this different approach was a different form baed on a carefully and deliberately planned Swvwral aspects of construction inspired the off-center approach. The sliding screen for ventilation and access was, by the nature of its function, asymmetrical. This opening, unlike the classic doorway, moved to varied positions and was often located on one side or another of the building facade. The post-and-beam construction-so logical when building with timber-made it possible to create cantilevered planes and extensions of roof overhangs that would have been impossible in stone or masonry construction where the essentially symmetrical vault and arch were more appropriate.

While Western design was constructed around the central axis and golden mean, the Japanese construction was based on modular systems. One of the simplest and most frequently used modules was he tatami mat, many of while which lined the floors of Japanese houses. They were made of iguana straw, covered with bound reeds, and bound together by black tape. The tatami mat measured about 3'x6'(0.91x1.83m), and its doubt square promotion lent itself to varied patterns and arrangements when the mats were laid in groups. These patterns, un turn, often set the dimensions of the interior space and influenced the overall proportion of the design. 

I didn't notice This can be also "grids". Japanese traditional architecture is Form and space were interdependent and inseparable. It is not complicated like new modern style however It is simple form of their art which is beautiful. 

Modern design owes a considerable debt to the centuries-old Japanese asymmetrical decision of space in architecture division of space in architecture and interior design. A basic module of Japanese form is the tatami mat, shown in a close-up at the left and in one of its many patterns above.

Asymmetry moves west

There is a growing realization that modern Western design owes a sizable debt to the simplicity, order, and asymmetrical division of space that has characterized Japanese art and architecture for many centuries. It is well known that from the late nineteenth century onward, Japanese prints had a significant influence on the form of Western painting and the graphic arts. However the influence of Japanese architectural design on the development of plastic form in the West is less well-documented.

In 1893, Frank Lloyd Wright, then in his twenties, made several visits to the Japanese pavilion called Ho-o-den at the Chicago World's Fair. This pavilion, a rare example of Japanese traditional architecture, demonstrated the oriental respect for space and the unique asymmetrical division of exterior planes with dark wooden accents. A few years later, Wright designed and built a new one for the Ward Willets family in Highland Park, IIIinois. Not only did the plan of this house, one of the early prairie houses, substitute flow for Palladian symmetry, but, more important, the facade of the house reflected the Japanese divisions of space that Wright had seen in the Ho-o-den pavilion.

It was the nature of Frank Llod Wright's genius that he never acknowledged influences on his own work or bothered to accept the compliment of his influences on others. Yet even a casual review of his work and the work of other twentieth century designers confirms such influence in both directions. The Japanese influence on the Ward Willets house in llliois might have been of no great importance to modern form, however, had it not been for the Warmth publications of 1910 and 1911, which brought the early work of Wright to the attention of European architects and artists. There is no question and the powerful influence these publications had on the modern movement in Europe, but one of the most unusual influences has not been clearly and completely established. This was Wright's influence on the division of linear space developed by Van Doesburg and Mondrian in the de Stijl movement in Holland. By 1918 both artists were using dark lines to divide their canvases in patterns that suggested Japanese asymmetrical design.

historian's viewpoint, sums it up in his book Frank Lloyd Wright with these words, "In my opinion the Dutch de Stiji movement itself owed even more to Wright's interwoven striping details and plastic masses than it did to French Cubism," In any case, whether this suggested path-from Japanese traditional architecture of Frank Lloyed Wright to Mondrian-is a true course or a mere coincidence, the effect go this breakthrough on the developing modern approach to form is beyond question.

Ward Willits house

The Mondrian influence

Mondrian's most significant contribution to graphic design lies in the purity and simplicity with which he approached the two-dimensional surface of his paintings. A study of the paintings he produced in the 1920s is a comprehensive lesson in the almost limitless possibilities for the asymmetrical division of space. This lesson, heeded by countless painters, had its most profound influence on the new generation of graphic designers who were inspired by the Mondrian breakthrough and who demonstrated in their layouts what a wild and unrestricted field he had opened up to contemporary design and layout.

Visual persistence

Grappa's commitment to a deeper intent within its work is exemplified by the visual persistence of its approach to identity design. This determination to see an idea to fruition led to the work which eventually made up the posters and book jacket for a Leni Riefenstahl exhibition in Berlin. The idea was originally presented as an identity concept for the Neues Museum in Weimar, Germany, involving the deployment of three yellow strips with reversed typography.

The Neue Museum posters were originally intended as part of a series of 'Poster couples' where the brief required equal status to be given to the artifacts within the collection and the artists featured. Strong horizontal yellow bars as a logo or device, offering multiple uses. They deliberately operate at Interference level against the background imagine-a more 'traditional' typographic approach might allow the imagine more space in which ro dominate the layout. They could also be used to highlight a list of events or certain artists within the catalogue, and the yellow text strips could be flyposted directly onto the freshly whitened 'Litfassaulen' the numerous circular 'poster-column' sites around the city.

When this design was rejected in favor of another approach, the group decided to wait for the moment and project when the concept would again be relevant. They later found a place for the work in the identity design for the Leni Riefenstahl exhibition, developing the yellow text strips further to create a resend-out typeface which is applied across background photographs on the exhibition catalogue and posters.

Grappa blotto

Neues Museum identity Grappa Blotto