During my recent sojourn into the world of designing (specifically for the web) – not so much in the graphics design department but more of the structural approaches -I happened upon some articles highlighting the benefits of an approach known as grid-based design. In a way, I suppose it is quite natural for a pen-and-paper or print layout technique to be eventually transferred to the web domain?!
However, the caveat is that grid-based designs are probably (my interpretation) more suited to conventional websites that need to follow the normal visual design standards and may not necessarily apply to artistic web sites where the goal is to be “different”. The theory is that the human eye sees a web page in a certain way, roughly from the top left to the bottom right, and the eyes can be guided to see elements in a pleasing and distinctive way when grids are used for the placement and alignment of all visual objects on the web page.
In fact, I bought the idea so much that I converted my Tango blog to one of the grid-based templates. Here are two links providing many hours of fun reading if ever you are interested in the theory and application of grid-based layout!