Do you have a Pinterest account? Well, the Grid-A-Licious is all about the grid system you’ll see on . I think Pinterest is one of the very first website to use this kind of layout where images with different lengths pile on top of each other to fill up the gaps. It’s like a complete jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces with different size and pictures.
What is Grid-A-Licious?
Grid-A-Licious is a jQuery plugin which the creator describes it as “divs are placed in chronological order with a special grid”. Yes, again, it’s a similar responsive grid system used on Pinterest. Of course, the designer behind Grid-A-Licious is Andreas Pihlström, a Swedish designer who is, in fact, part of the Pinterest design team now. No surprise there.
Anyway, Andreas develop the Grid-A-Licious simply because he can’t find any existing plugins that response or adapt to different screen sizes as the way he wanted – “I need the grid to be exact, fluid and float perfectly regardless of the screen size or device. This is exactly what Grid-A-Licious does.” And the best example of this is to view the website.
The Web Design
The Grid-A-Licious web design speaks for itself. All the grids and other elements on this website are fully responsive in every way. You can even select or drag to display it in different screen sizes. Or (for a bit of fun) you can add more grids to see how the plugin works (see Example 03 on the website).
It is all about the grid and very little else. So to make sure that you aren’t distracted while viewing the site, they use grayscale instead of rainbow, and simple Helvetica in place of slab serifs. By doing that, the website runs smoother and they can put your focus heavily on … whatever they wanted you to see most.
What can you get from this?
Apart from the plugin itself (which you can download it at ), I’m not so sure whether this make sense to you in a developer’s perspective. But what it does make sense to you, or at least, to your design or business, is that you should always tell your audience what you do at the very first moment they see your website. What is the very first thing you want your audience to see most? Can it be noticed as soon as they arrive at your site?
But putting too much details about what you do at the first place might confuse your audience, as Ann Handley pointed out in her recent book, : “A highly effective website contains just enough information to inform visitors without making them feel as if fireworks are going off their faces.” Much like Grid-A-Licious, the page should give a to users about where they are now, what they can do with it, and where they should go next. In short, you should form an unbroken bridge with each simple and comfortable steps leading from what you want them to see to what you want them to do.
