Sarah Edmands Martin

DESIGNER

Associate Professor
University of Notre Dame

Designer, artist, and scholar working at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics. 


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Design Issues Volume 40, Issue 2 

Book cover design2024
Book cover design for Design Issues out of MIT Press, the oldest American academic journal examining design history, theory, and criticism.










Concept


This Design Issues cover design meditates on the use of the grid throughout the history of design. In design, the grid has always set both the meter and the rhythm for the delivery of ideas. From the Golden Ratio, to the "Rule of Thirds," to modular and hierarchical structures of the International Typographic Style, to 960px grids that map to CSS libraries, the grid is an evergreen element of the discipline. 


Read more about this Design Issues special issue here.



book cover design
illustration
publication design
typography





Iteration 


 


The Grid


A sophisticated meditation on the grid as both a structural device and a conceptual framework in art and design history, the front and back cover design employs a complex interplay of geometric abstraction, modularity, and computational aesthetics to foreground the grid’s evolving role—from Renaissance perspective systems to modernist rationalism and contemporary digital design.

Here, an intricate composition of intersecting lines, overlapping shapes, and varying opacities are bound within a rigid, grid-based structure. This reflects the historical function of the grid as both an ordering principle and a means of imposing visual logic, dating back to the Golden Ratio and Alberti’s Renaissance treatises on perspective. The visible rulers and measurement indicators further emphasize the grid’s legacy in technical drawing, typography, and architectural drafting.

The heavy reliance on rectilinear forms, modular repetition, and an underlying logic of proportion allude to the Bauhaus and Swiss International Typographic Style, where the grid was a foundational tool for clarity and functionalist aesthetics. Designers such as Josef Müller-Brockmann championed the grid as a neutral, objective structure, enabling legibility and visual harmony. The cover’s meticulously balanced elements, particularly the interplay of verticals, horizontals, and diagonals, reinforce these principles of systematic design.










A sophisticated meditation on the grid as both a structural device and a conceptual framework in art and design history.











Previous designers that have created covers for Design Issues are among some of the top designers in the world: Louise Fili, Michael Beirut, Massimo Vignelli, Paula Scher, and Milton Glaser (left to right), as wells as my former mentor who passed in 2015, Robert Sedlack.