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What it argues
Making and Breaking the Grid is a textbook for graphic designers that does something most design textbooks avoid: it teaches both halves of its title with equal seriousness. The first half explains how grid systems work — their history, their structural logic, the variety of grid types (manuscript, column, modular, hierarchical), and the specific decisions that go into building one for a project. The second half examines how designers break grids deliberately and effectively, arguing that rule-breaking is only meaningful when the rule is understood first.
Timothy Samara's historical account of the grid begins in medieval manuscript layout and moves through the Swiss International Style of the 1950s and 1960s — the period when grid-based design reached its most systematic expression in the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann and his contemporaries. The International Style treated the grid as a structural and moral commitment: not just an organizational tool but an argument about rationality, universality, and the proper relationship between form and content. Samara presents this history clearly without being hagiographic about it.
What it gets right
- 1.
A grid is a structural system for organizing visual information, not an aesthetic choice. Understanding how grids create order, hierarchy, and rhythm is foundational to design practice.
- 2.
The Swiss International Style of the 1950s and 1960s treated grid-based design as both a functional and an ethical position — an argument for rationality and universal communication.
- 3.
Column grids, manuscript grids, modular grids, and hierarchical grids each imply different content relationships. Choosing the right structure is a design decision that precedes any formal choices.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Timothy Samara is an American graphic designer, educator, and author based in New York. He has taught design at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, and New York University. His other books include Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual, Typography Workbook, and Publication Design Workbook. His work spans branding, editorial design, wayfinding systems, and packaging. Making and Breaking the Grid, first published in 2002 with a second edition in 2017, has become one of the most widely used introductory texts on layout and grid systems in graphic design education.
