Grids

One thing I have paid very little attention to while reading were grids. Yes, of course you notice when something is not pleasing to the eye as you read. When we started reading and talking about grids it all kind of made sense to me all at once. Though it was something that I have never noticed before, I could really see how girds affect the way we read things. The problem with text today is that we are moving away from some of the traditional types of text and grid alignment. In class we looked at the Huffington Post online editorial. This was something that really stuck out. I felt that they used a lot of traditional grids, but they were all used almost at once. This really left me with a cluttered feeling. My eyes would wander all around the page trying to take in as much information as possible. It almost became a tedious task for me to read.

I began to do a little research on different grids when I remembered a book I had read my sophomore year of high school. The book was called Crank and Ellen Hopkins wrote it. She took a real minimalist approach to the text and grid style. Each page of this basic novel sized book had maybe thirty words per page. The way she wrote it was just as interesting. Most of the lines in the book are supposed to be read horizontally in a standard manner, while the lines in the center of the page could be read vertically creating a different meaning to the story. Though this was really easy to read there was far to little text. This lead me to the idea that not only can grids be set up so they are overwhelming, but they can be extremely underwhelming. This can lead a readers mind to begin to wander or bore the reader. Click here to view the book Crank by Ellen Hopkins