Onion Grid

Khol Vinh from Behavior, describes the sixteen-column grid behind the recent redesign of The Onion.com.

The site will never display sixteen individual columns of content, of course, but dividing the page up so rigorously helped us in making logical decisions when placing items on the page — there’s always a column edge nearby with which to align an element, so fewer intuitive placement decisions must be made. This is the “rational” part of the term “rational grid,” and it’s exactly the intellectual part of this craft that gets lots of design geeks — like myself — all hot and bothered.