One idea at a time · 4

Taste is a small object of named weights.

The composer scores every candidate page by rules read out of Müller-Brockmann: few graded picture sizes (p.11), aligned edges (pp.60, 91), one picture may dominate (p.70), a picture belongs near its reference. Each rule is a number, and someone chose those numbers. That is a confession as much as a design — the postwar grid sold itself as the removal of the designer's hand, and the generator does not make that claim. It relocates the hand into the weights.

Here is the hand. Three of the weights, on one page of The Field, recomposed live as you move them.

anchor pull — how hard a picture is held near its reference
0.45 cost of a new size — few graded sizes, MB p.11
1.2 hero chance — may one picture dominate, MB p.70
0.30

show the grid

At zero pull the pictures drift anywhere the score allows. Pulled hard, every picture pins itself to its reference's column and the pages go rigid — that was once a bug here, and now it is a slider.

See the whole book compose itself →