After reading “The new typography”, I think designers need to have the courage to break the rules while following them. According to Jan Tschichold, “New Typography allows much greater flexibility in design, it also encourages “standardization”. Excellent typesetting needs to constrain and standardize the elements of the layout to make it cleaner and more organized, but in order to make the overall layout more flexible, more lively, more contrast and more detailed, we should also dare to break the shackles.

Flexible use of grids is an important aid to maintaining organized design. Josef Muller Brocjmann says in “Grid and design philosophy”, that “Grid shows that the designer conceives his work in terms that are constructive and oriented to the future.” I couldn’t agree more with him, in my design experience I think the grid is the best aid in my creation. A grid is a scaffold for a designer to organize text and images in a sensible, conscious, and natural way. It is the invisible soul that produces regularity, order and coherence, and it is often used by designers to better anticipate where information will be placed and to rationalize ideas.

The design of the program also needs the help of the grid, the relationship between the two is mutually reinforcing. Like Karl Gerstner said “if the grid is considered as a proportional regulator, a system, it is a programme par excellence. Squared paper is a (arithmetic) grid, but not a programme.” Grid provides a better design framework for program design, and program design selects different grids through different information resources.