"Between the lines
"There are few things more reassuring in life than the simplicity of a gridded notebook.
The well-ordered lines and squares imply an unwavering rationality and logic—qualities that many crave in an era of natural disasters, unchecked prejudice, and volatile political leaders. In times of stress and anxiety, our impulse is to find a way to break down an overwhelming situation into simpler, more solvable parts.
But the grid's history is not so straight and narrow. From the 15th century to today, gridded paper's cultural significance has taken a swerving, unpredictable, and altogether fascinating path.
Off the books
Nearly all of today's popular luxury notebook brands—Moleskine, Rhodia, Leuchtturm, Fieldnotes, MUJI—have gridded options. "I think the attraction is nostalgia and a curiosity," Neal Whittington, the owner of London stationery shop Present & Correct, told Quartz. But the trend isn't limited to paper products: You can also find the design on duvet covers, wallpaper, and writing equipment.
Murky origins
Graph paper has long been appreciated by artists, architects, and scientists for its ability to underpin their visions. Cesare Cesariano used hand-drawn graph paper to render Vitruvius' ideally proportioned man in his 1521 translation of "De architectura" (published three decades after de Vinci's Vitruvian Man.)
The origin of gridded paper is near impossible to pinpoint, though a 2006 paper (pdf) credits the patenting of commercially produced printed graph paper to a Dr. Buxton of England in 1795.
Early adopters
One prominent graph paper devotee was Thomas Jefferson, who drew up plans for the Virginia capitol on specially engraved "squared paper"—originally intended for silk weavers—that he ordered from Paris. (This sketch is for the University of Virginia's rotunda.) A nut for the decimal system, Jefferson preferred gridded paper that was graduated in decimal divisions.
Purity and subversion
In the hands of 20th-century modernists, the purity and rationality of the grid was a way of expressing optimism for the future. Rather than relying on the grid as a compositional device, modernists incorporated it directly onto the surface of the work itself.
One of the most famous was artist Sol LeWitt, who first used the pattern in his three-dimensional modular cube structures. Other artists, including the cartoonist and illustrator Saul Steinberg, avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, and German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, also made use of graph paper and the grid.
But the grid was flipped on its head in the 1970s and 1980s, when postmodern graphic designers sought to subvert its association with rationality and cool calculation. The ripped and collaged graph paper in Wolfgang Weingart's State Art Aid poster, for example, and April Greiman's theme of fragmented gridded planes, expressed the notion that surfaces covered up the truth.
Contemporary American artist Chuck Close started out using the grid as a way of ordering reality in his photo-realistic portraits. In his early paintings, he famously used the grid as an invisible mapping tool, much like the 15th century artists, but later he brought the grid to the forefront.
POP QUIZ Which of these cities is not built on a grid? |
Visit this Pinterest collectiondevoted to all things graph paper.
Living on the grid
The online world is made up of thousands of tiny, gridded pixels. And in the early 1980s, designer Susan Kare created the first computer icons for the Macintosh—the "Happy Mac," the error bomb, the trashcan—using graph paper.
Using one square to equal one pixel, Kare filled gridded notebooks with fuzzy blown-out versions of the tiny icon in black ink or hot pink highlighter. Now part of the permanent collections at MoMA and SFMoMA, the first icon drawings were actually transferred from graph paper to the computer screenbefore Apple built an icon editor.
That's the beautiful paradox of the grid. The challenge of working within constraints can lead to more expansive things."
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