The grid has long played a central role in the development of art and design due to its organizational nature; acting as a matrix for controlling the placement of elements. In art: Foreground and background. In design: Image and type. And so on.

网格由于其组织性质，长期以来在艺术和设计的发展中起着核心作用。 作为控制元素放置的矩阵。 在艺术中​​：前景和背景。 在设计中：图像和类型。 等等。

In his book Grid Systems in Graphic Design / Raster Systeme Fur Die Visuele Gestaltung, Josef Müller-Brockmann wrote: “The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice.”

在他的书中电网系统在平面设计/光栅Systeme的皮草模具Visuele Gestaltung ，约瑟夫·缪勒·布罗克曼说：“网格系统是一种辅助，不能保证。 它允许多种可能的用途，并且每个设计师都可以寻找适合其个人风格的解决方案。 但是必须学习如何使用网格。 这是一门需要实践的艺术 。”

And it’s a practice that has aided designers and artists in bringing order to chaos—often on vertical and horizontal lines—since the birth of written language. The development of the modern grid can be traced back to the late medieval period, pre-mechanical type, but its symbolic aspect is not generally recognized or often suspected to the untrained.

自从书面语言诞生以来，这种做法已帮助设计师和艺术家使混乱(通常在垂直和水平线上)变得混乱。 现代网格的发展可以追溯到中世纪晚期，即机械前的类型， 但是其象征性的方面通常未被未经培训的人认可或经常被怀疑。

In autumn 1986 Jack Williamson published “The Grid: History, Use, and Meaning” in Design Issues. In his essay, he defined four distinct periods that showed changing values in the constructive usage of the grid that impacted the meaning of the grid itself.

1986年秋天，杰克·威廉姆森(Jack Williamson)出版了《网格：历史，使用和意义》。 设计问题 。 在他的论文中，他定义了四个不同的时期，这些时期在网格的建设性使用中显示出变化的值，这影响了网格本身的含义。

中世纪晚期的网格 (The late medieval grid)

The hands and minds of early bookmakers were guided by the divine, so it’s not surprising that the earliest examples of the grid are best characterized by late medieval Christian manuscripts. The late medieval—or point-based—grid supported a symbolism on the page that represented relationships between the superphysical (above) and reality (below) in both image representation and text placement.

早期博彩公司的手法和思想受到神的引导，因此，最早的网格示例以中世纪晚期的基督教手稿为特征就不足为奇了。 中世纪晚期(或基于点的)网格支持页面上的象征，该象征代表图像表示和文本放置中超物理(上)与现实(下)之间的关系 。

And these earliest examples show a deep reliance on the power of visuals in storytelling at a time when most of the public was largely illiterate.

这些最早的例子表明，在大多数公众大多是文盲的时代，讲故事时非常依赖视觉效果。

The Book of Kells, a ninth-century book containing the gospels of the New Testament, shows careful attention to arrangement of elements on guidelines to create symmetry between hand-written text and visual decoration. The development of medieval grid-based design extends into the fifteenth-century, with Williamson noting Tres Belles Heures de Notre Dame as a prime example.

凯尔斯之书(Kells )是一本包含新约福音的九世纪书籍，它特别注意指南中元素的排列方式，以使手写文字和视觉装饰之间保持对称。 中世纪基于网格的设计的发展一直延伸到15世纪，威廉姆森(Williamson)注意到Tres Belles Heures de Notre Dame是一个很好的例子。

As the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, so too was the modern grid entering its infancy. Gutenberg’s 42-line bible (1450–55) contains visible lines used to position text, headings, and margins in a 2-column grid, and many Gothic illuminated manuscripts featured sets of horizontal rules placed to guide the scribe’s hand and ensure optimal engagement with the image.

随着黑暗时代让位于文艺复兴时期，现代网格也进入了婴儿期。 古腾堡(Gutenberg)的42行圣经(1450–55)包含用于在2列网格中定位文本，标题和页边距的可见线，并且许多哥特式照明手稿都带有水平线组，以引导抄写员的手并确保与之的最佳接合。图片。

文艺复兴时期和笛卡尔网格 (The Renaissance and Cartesian grid)

Beginning with the Renaissance, the grid began shifting to field-based—using numerical values to emphasize the repetition of vertical and horizontal axis lines in continuous extension—in turn defining relationships that occurred in the physical world versus the superphysical of the medieval grid.

从文艺复兴时期开始，网格开始转向基于字段的网格(使用数值强调连续延伸的垂直和水平轴线的重复)，进而定义了物理世界与中世纪网格的超物理关系 。

The grid was now being used to depict an extension of the viewer’s own physical space. The rise of mathematical pictorial perspective (such as the perspective lines seen in da Vinci’s The Last Supper) would continue to drive the grid of choice into seventeenth-century painting.

现在，该网格用于描绘观看者自己的物理空间的扩展。 数学绘画透视图(例如达芬奇的《最后的晚餐》中的透视线)的兴起将继续推动选择网格进入17世纪的绘画。

Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) was the first attempt to inform the meaning of the grid and in his later treatise of the same year, Geometry, he laid the formulaic foundation for determining grid coordinates and axes that would become the Cartesian grid. A prime example of this can be seen in Jacques Louis David’s The Death of Socrates, in which the grid used to transfer the drawn figure onto the canvas is evident in the finished painting.

笛卡尔(Descartes)的方法论 ( Discourse on Method) (1637)是首次尝试了解网格的含义，并在同年的后来论文《 几何学》(Geometry)中奠定了确定网格坐标和轴的公式基础，这些坐标和轴将成为笛卡尔网格。 雅克·路易·戴维(Jacques Louis David)的《苏格拉底之死》(Death of Socrates)就是一个很好的例子，在该作品中，用于将绘制的人物转移到画布上的网格很明显。

现代网格 (The modern grid)

In the early twentieth century, grid use moved strongly toward structure. Beginning, according to Williamson, with Cubism and peaking with Mondrian’s pictorial grid and the de Stijl movement.

在20世纪初， 网格的使用向结构强烈发展 。 根据威廉姆森的说法，从立体主义开始，到蒙德里安的图画网格和de Stijl运动达到顶峰。

The modern grid became a free-form version of the Cartesian grid. In design, the highly influential Bauhaus style used the invisible matrix of the grid to present cleanly geometric sans serif type while also including vertical and horizontal bars and rules—parts of the regularly invisible grid—to subdivide the page as design elements. The additional practice of sole upper or lower case letter usage further emphasized strict adherence to grid lines.

现代网格成为笛卡尔网格的自由形式。 在设计中，极富影响力的包豪斯(Bauhaus)风格使用了网格的不可见矩阵来呈现整洁的无衬线几何形状，同时还包括垂直和水平条和规则(规则不可见的网格的一部分)来将页面细分为设计元素。 单独使用大写或小写字母的其他做法进一步强调了严格遵守网格线。

The Bauhaus philosophy of modern grid use was expressed in Jan Tschichold’s seminal The New Typography (1928). The subsequent generation of Swiss graphic designers would dictate the modern grid into the 1960s, proving to be a universally-valid and future-focused design tool, while still retaining a majority of Cartesian symbolism.

包·豪斯(Jack Tschichold)的开创性著作《新印刷术》( The New Typography ，1928年)表达了包豪斯现代网格使用的哲学。 后来的瑞士平面设计师将现代网格定为1960年代，被证明是一种普遍有效且面向未来的设计工具，同时仍然保留了大多数笛卡尔的象征意义。

Outside of moving from the page to the screen, the modern grid has changed very little today. Mobile devices and responsive web design placed a greater emphasis on modular grids, which were first developed in the mid-nineteenth-century to aid in newspaper layouts.

除了从页面移动到屏幕之外，现代网格今天的变化很小。 移动设备和响应式网页设计更加注重模块化网格，模块化网格最早于19世纪中叶开发用于辅助报纸版面设计。

后现代的网格 (The postmodern grid)

During the 1970s, like all things, a number of designers began to throw out the conventions of the modern grid. The deconstructed postmodern grid brought the elements to the forefront of the composition as decoration, often visually exposed and anti-rationally random.

1970年代，就像所有事物一样，许多设计师开始放弃现代网格的惯例。 经过解构的后现代网格将元素作为装饰摆到了作品的最前沿，通常是视觉上暴露且反理性的。

“Usually the grid was established and then violated,” wrote Williamson. Like other manifestations of postmodern culture, the postmodern grid completely reversed the superphysical of the late medieval grid to create an opening instead into the sub physical (beneath the surface).

威廉姆森写道：“通常会先建立网格，然后再破坏网格。” 像后现代文化的其他表现形式一样，后现代网格完全颠倒了中世纪晚期网格的超物理结构，从而为地下空间(在表面之下)创造了一个开口。

A prime example of the descent to the sub physical is the Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten, likely encountered by a majority of students in primary education classrooms.

下降到子物理的一个典型的例子是查尔斯和蕾伊默斯电影十的权力 ，有可能是由大部分学生在小学教室中遇到。

The introduction of computers introduced a new approach to design. In addition to making grid development easier and more mathematically perfect (and reproducible), new movements like California Graphic Design emerged. This group, among others, would continue to push avant-garde grid usage to further heights with the aid of computer software.

计算机的引入引入了一种新的设计方法。 除了使网格开发更容易，数学上更完美(并且可重现)外，还出现了诸如加利福尼亚图形设计公司的新机芯。 该小组，除其他外，将继续借助计算机软件将前卫网格的使用推向新的高度。

Williamson’s research presents a thorough survey of historical grid use toward an effective understanding of use and meaning. But, more importantly, it allows us to see and think about grids in a new way. Not only in art and design, but in everyday objects, or even nature itself.

威廉姆森(Williamson)的研究提出了对历史网格使用的全面调查，以有效地了解使用和含义。 但是，更重要的是，它允许我们以新的方式查看和思考网格。 不仅在艺术和设计上，而且在日常物品甚至自然本身中。

In Making and Breaking the Grid (2005) Timothy Samara states “in order to effectively break the rules of grid-based design, one must first understand those rules.” Understanding the meaning, as well as the purpose, allows us to more effectively utilize the grid as a tool and develop new ways of implementing it in our work.

蒂莫西·萨马拉(Timothy Samara)在《 制造与破坏网格》 (2005年)中指出：“ 为了有效地打破基于网格的设计规则 ， 首先必须了解这些规则 。” 了解含义和目的，使我们能够更有效地将网格用作工具，并开发在工作中实现网格的新方法。