An Event Apart Seattle 2017: Designing with Grid by Jen Simmons

Jen Simmons’ talk picked up essentially where Rachel’s left off, filling in a lot of the blanks that we might’ve had around CSS Grid, while also stressing that the new layout options will change how we approach the web as significantly as 25 years of filmmaking affected the film industry.

She also covers some of the core concepts of visual design as codified in the last century of graphic design and similar fields. For those of us who aren’t visual design workers on a regular basis, these are some very useful guides.

An Event Apart Seattle 2017 Designing with Grid by Jen Simmons (pdf)

(I would argue that “design patterns” or “don’t do what other people are doing just to follow the trend” were also valid themes of this year’s conference.)

https://twitter.com/caughtexception/status/849330420151971840

Here’s a picture of what a CSS grid might look like with the blue boxes being the content within the grid.

If you’re a designer (or developer) and you haven’t read Understanding Comics or Scott McCloud’s other books, you’re missing an incredibly accessible crash course in visual design and how the human brain turns what it sees on paper or in screens into information.

(Ugh. I hate modernist art.)

Japanese films and graphic novels are a good place to look for examples of verticality, where the subject of the screen is a small part of a very tall view.

Comics genius Will Eisner was also a master at using the power of verticality in his designs, and since I love Will Eisner’s work, here’s an example.

Jen posted her slides on Speakerdeck.com

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