“The grid is an integral part of book design. It’s not something that you see. It’s just like underwear: you wear it, but it’s not to be exposed. The grid is the underwear of the book.” – Massimo Vignelli
Michael Beirut and the team at Pentagram worked on the concept of a short film highlighting Massimo Vignelli’s building block of design – the grid. The film reveals each successive step as Vignelli’s sketches are transformed into a finished book. Having worked with Vignelli for 10 years, Beirut was familiar with his unique way of designing books, which involves sitting with the all the ingredients — text and images — and drawing each page with a pencil, including all the photographs, using a grid as a layout guide.