Even if you want to work without grids, you still need visual systems. Grids are one of the most helpful inventions since communication designers had to design more than one deliverable. By limiting the options where to place text or images and in which size, so much time has been saved. Apart from being an efficient design tool, they also establish a comprehensible order that makes reading easier. Having said that, you are not obliged to use them.
A visual system is nothing else than a set of rules, an instruction manual for humans and/or machines. By inventing rules, you can design processes that lead to distinctive visual identities. The instructions you are giving are actually code that can be executed by humans (usually slowly) or by machines (usually more quickly). When you let these rules be executed by machines instead of humans, you gain a lot of new possibilities.

Not just that your design can become more complex, you can instruct any machine that is manageable with code. Even a remote-controlled spray can installation¹, drone, or car can be used to visualize the applications of your system.
But not everything programmable needs to be executed by machines. The imperfection coming from humans can create interesting details a machine would avoid. Suprematism, Constructivism, and De Stijl would have been extremely boring if not painted by humans but printed by machines. Executing programs by humans also have a collaborative dynamic that can add interesting interpretations within the parameters of the rules.²
We see and remember only the things that make sense to us. Based on our experience some things appear to be comprehensible and some don’t.

Not everything that is logical to us is logical to someone eise, because the other person has different experiences in life. The more people with different backgrounds we want to reach, the more universal the language we use has to be. Maths and physics are such universal languages. If you show a person from the other side of the world an animation using physics, this person will intuitively understand it because they’ve lived with the same physics on the same earth.

Which advantages does using a grid have?

While you do not need a grid, grids make it easier to determine the positions and sizes of the assets. Just as the assets can react to formats, grids can also adapt to different formats by repeating or distorting its modules. Designing with grids has several advantages:

Structure

Grids create a comprehensible visual structure that can help to distinguish different information types from each other. For example, three columns can be used for three different languages or the top row can always be used for headings.

Aesthetics

Grids can create the feeling of order and harmony, but also of dynamism. Through the interaction between positive and negative spaces or the irregular and regular placement of elements tension can be built up.

Efficiency

At first glance, grids look like more work for the designer. In fact, they save us a lot of work. By reducing the options for positioning assets, the number of decisions to be made when designing is also reduced. If, in addition to the grid, you have found a system for distributing the various types of information, you only have to make a manageable number of design decisions on each page. With a book of 48 pages or more, you will quickly see how much time this saves you.

Harmony

After a number of pages you will also see that the design decisions influenced by the grid make the book a harmonious whole, even if each page looks different you will always notice the underlying logic.

Identification

The possibility of creating a recognizable visual language with grids is very interesting. If the grid, and / or the system on how to apply the assets on the grid, is distinctive it serves as an identifiable design element.

Instructions / Design Manual

The description of how something is designed is often disregarded as a non-essential part of the design process. I consider it as one of the most important phases. If a system is easy to understand and apply it will most likely be used for a long time. If a system is highly complex and there is a human applying it, it will most likely be wrongly interpreted.

1. Jürg Lehni programmed a tool to spray paint vector images to walls. He called his machine “Hektor”. The perfection of vectors and the imperfection of the spray paint create an interesting contrast and a distinctive visual language that could serve as a visual identity.
2. Studio Moniker’s “Conditional Design” workshops are a good example for programmed design, executed by humans. They imposed on themselves rules, which they then executed together. The execution of Sol le Witt’s murals come to mind also, who instructed his assistants how to draw his huge murals with tiny pencils. From far the murals appear to be perfect, but from close you notice the imperfection of the human stroke.

A grid helps to visualize rules. Everybody understands what it means to divide the width of the format by ten and use a tenth of the format as a space around an object. The modules resulting from the division of the format help to define position and size of objects and spaces and the best thing about them, they are scalable and adapt to the size of the format.
At the risk of mentioning the obvious, I would like to point out that there is a difference between graphic and typographic grids and that these must be coordinated with each other. While typographic grids need space in between columns and rows, also called gutter, graphic grids can work perfectly without the gutter. In fact, they are easier to manage and calculate without the gutter. When working with graphic-heavy visual systems I usually start with a graphic grid and place a typographic grid inside the sections which have text. If I am working on a book or any other text-heavy application I start with the typographic grid and place the graphic grid inside of the modules of the typographic grid.

Another option would be to place a format-spanning typographic grid on top of a graphic grid, but to this date design software does not make this easy.

How to create a grid with different geometric forms?

Reset

Forget about the software you are working with and the possibilities they offer you at the moment, and you will see that you are very limited and that there are countless other ways to develop grids. You only need to look at centuries old Islamic patterns. These seemingly complex patterns are based on simple grids based on different geometric shapes and their intelligent use. Even the much simpler posters for Musica Viva by Josef Müller-Brockmann, designed on a grid rotated by 45 degrees, look very innovative for a today’s designer adapted to today’s software. Not to mention Müller-Brockmann’s circular grids. All of these are quite complicated to realize with today’s software.

Starting Points

Begin your experiments with alternative grid systems with a geometric shape that is not the rectangle. For example, take a triangle or hexagon and put them together. Use the resulting characteristics to design shapes and patterns, but also to design or arrange fonts.

Adaptation

Today’s software favors the grid based on horizontal and vertical guidelines. Adapting the grid based on other shapes is complicated. This is why I have worked with triangles, pentagons, and hexagons that fit into a rectangular grid.

How to use grids?

There are different ways to use a grid. You can generate shapes by filling modules or their outline. You can also use the module or outline to align text or graphics. The more unusual the grid and its use is the better it serves as a distinctive visual identity. These couple of options give you already sheer unlimited possibilities. You can repeat the modules and use them to create larger patterns, lines, frames, or labels, depending on the need of each deliverable. Adjusting the complexity of the grid needs to be dependent on content and scale of the deliverable. Simple solutions are better suited for small applications. The larger the format, the more complex you can get.