I love newspaper design — before the World Wide Web, one of the jobs I had was as a editor of a community newspaper in Garden Grove, California, and designing pages around a regimented grid was not only challenging, but fun, because it was designing within in that phone booth and coming up with something cool was rewarding.

Most good design and screen-based user interfaces follow some kind of grid — whether it be the orderly layout of items in a form, or a multi-column design of a blog. Grids bring order, and the grids don’t necessarily have to be symmetrical to be good design (the New York Times website is a great example).

For newspaper design, the closest guide to designing content sites, asymmetrical grids and number of columns were not only accepted, but encouraged, and most major newspapers are 5 or 7 columns wide. Peruse News Designer to see examples in the front pages of world newspapers.

Resources:

• Smashing Magazine has a really good article on creative usage of grids
• An article at A List Apart about thinking outside the grid
• Design By Grid, a resource with a lot of links

1. Don’t make users think
2. Don’t squander users’ patience
3. Manage to focus the users’ attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Don’t be afraid of white space
8. Communicate effectively with a “visible language”
9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often

Click here to read the complete list.