Can I get a final verdict from Eli please?. I've see two convincing arguments for and against grids today.

This is what DN has become.

I enjoy these types of back-and-forths.

Hopefully, both parties learn something from this. That's how we progress as designers and as human beings.

(That's my floaty/out there/corny post quota filled for the day.)

Grids facilitate precise iterations, rapid transition from design to development, require less micro-communication and reduce the chance of errors and incorrect interpretations. Grids are here to stay :)

Does anyone else wants to start a fake designer beef over icons?

I have to agree here. The other author was advocating for self-serving design, asserting that design is subjective and it's acceptable to design purely with intuition or opinion. That's a very egotistical way to approach design.

Design isn't creative for the sake of being creative; it leverages thoughtful creativity to better serve its purpose or solve a problem. It doesn't break conventions for the sake of breaking conventions; it observes tried-and-true inventions from the past, iterates on them, and improves them over time. The author wasn't describing design. He was describing art.

I too have written about this. And now I'm speaking about it.

• Essay: Design is not Art
• Essay: Good Design is Humble
• Speech: Design is not Art

I think there's a little bit of confusion on both sides. Having read through a lot of the original author's comments on the initial DN post I think a better title would have been, 'There is no grid... framework'.

It seems to me that he's not suggesting we ditch grids entirely in some post-modern David Carson style, rather that we should design a grid system as per the unique requirements of the project, instead of than jumping to a framework to solve our problem. So don't ditch grids, just be more conscious about them.

In my own work i've found that responsive design has really messed with my idea of grids in general and i'm still picking up the pieces of what the best approach might be, so I can certainly empathise with some of this.

Sadly the title in its current form is rather incendiary, and doesn't really reflect the message (as I interpret it) so I can understand how people have jumped to the obvious conclusion.

Savage.

Or, in the words of David Jury: rules can be broken, but never ignored.

Follow a grid, break the grid, use your eyes.

Except 14-column no-gutter grids. These are just horrible.

Context: I'm currently developing a website with a 14-column no-gutter grid and I hate it.

Dude, amen.

Thanks for writing this. I was just going to write a post with the exact same context but you already did much better. thanks!