In the body it’s the heart, in a band it’s the drummer and in a magazine it’s the grid. No matter what the outfit, there’s a crucial element that keeps it all together, seldom recognised and ultimately forgotten. But not by Astrid Stavro, the graphic designer who decided that the humble grid deserved much more. While at London’s Royal College of Art, Stavro printed some of her favourite grids onto yellow paper to make ‘Grid-it!’ notepads.
‘By divorcing them from their purpose,’ she says, ‘we render the invisible visible.’ When she launched the pads at her graduate show, they sold out. So she found a producer (Miquelrius) and began to expand the business by turning the grids into shelves. ‘The grids end up storing the magazines they initially created,’ she says.
Of all the grids selected for the notepads, only David Hillman’s and Willy Fleckhaus’s were initially adopted for shelves. But when Stavro set up a studio in her native Barcelona in 2005, she added Le Corbusier’s ‘Modulor’ and Josef Müller-Brockmann’s ‘Raster Systeme’. She is now playing with scale and materials and seeking a manufacturer. As for the notable notepads, Wallpaper’s grid could be next up.
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