Emphasizing the Grid
The Art Institute of Chicago's website is a very grid based website. It uses many design elements to visually emphasize the idea of the grid. All of the images on the site are a square or rectangular format, and all of the information on the site is also contained in boxes. They also use the element of line to break up information; this further emphasizes the idea of the grid. The only evidence of them some what breaking the grid is the left column of information; on the homepage for instance, the information on left does not directly line up with the box above it, yet it is still in a column format and left aligned. The fact that this site is for the Art Institute of Chicago makes it appropriate that it is a grid based site; however, because it is an institution of art they could have added more organic elements to break up the rigidity.
Organically Breaking the Grid
The Threadless Kids website is a much more relaxed site as it is a clothing site for kids, so due to this fact is is not limited to a strict grid format. In fact, they break the grid on several occasions. First of all, the background image fades into the top header which makes the header blend into the background. Also, the top header's navigational area is very unstructured as the words to get to each page exist in a balloon, and the balloons are not lined up but hanging at different levels. The images are not hard rectangles, they are instead rounded of rectangles, and the information is also contained in rounded off rectangles. When you go to the various pages the structure becomes much more grid like showing the articles of clothing in rows and columns; however, the images are not contained in boxes. The images are of the articles of clothing themselves, so an image of a shirt looks like an image of a shirt with no background or rectangle to conform it to a square like shape. The images that are in rectangles such as the heading on other pages also break the grid format as they have images coming out of the rectangles border so they break up the rigidity as well.
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