Orthogons

This project aims to come up with some useful grids for design that are not boring (like the kinds you get out of the box with a Bootstrap or a Foundation).

It is motivated by Jen Simmons’ excellent Layout Land video series. In a particularly amazing episode, she points to the content-out layout philosophy (articulated Mark Boulton and Nathon Ford, drawing from Linda van Deursen).

My simple summary of the idea is this:

• Don’t start with a uniform grid just because; that’s context-free to the point of being generic.
• Take a good look at the content you have, and define relationships and structure based on this.
• Use this structure to build out suitable grids, and further, use special ratios of widths and heights when doing so to make your design feel really organic!

In this repository, you’re going to find some experiments with these ideas as I attempt to arrive at a more human layout for my personal website.

Experiments with non-uniform grids

1. A look at the 12 orthogons of Wersin

This is a really basic first step, where I simply visualise all these special ratios on a 4 column grid. The first column starts one unit wide, and the rest subsequently grow in multiples of the ratio.

The code in the repository has generators (in Python) that can be tweaked for more columns (and ratios).

2. A simple article template

TODO: With outsets, asides, different width images, etc.

Discussions and contributing

If you’d like to talk about this stuff or contribute to it, I’d love to hear from you:

• You can talk to me like a human on twitter
• You can introduce your idea or suggestion as a GitHub issue
• You can introduce your idea or suggestion with code as a GitHub pull request

Do not be intimidated if you are new or inexperienced at this stuff. All ideas are welcome and this is a safe place to share them.

Copyright and license

Copyright (c) 2018 Harish Narayanan.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.