TWEN MAGAZINE
WILLY FLECKHAUS, 1959

265 x 335 mm / 60 gridded sheets
Notepad edition 100 copies
Twelve-column modular grid

One of the most notable grids ever developed for magazine layout was the
one that Willy Fleckhaus devised for
Twen magazine in Germany in 1959. With this unique grid he designed some superb layouts using varied content over the decade of the 1960s. The grid was a twelve-unit grid (also called a twelve-lined grid) and it was designed for a large page size - 265 x 335 mm. The small dimension of the grid only gave a column width of about 4 picas and it was probably never used; but by combining the units, Fleckhaus had the option of working in a 6, 4, 3, or 2-cloumn typesetting. The horizontal divisions were coupled with nine divisions of the vertical space, creating a whole series of coordinates for the placement of visual matter and text units. (extracted from Allen Hurlburt, The Grid, John Wiley & Sons, 1978)