The grid of everything: how one spreadsheet layout took over the web
Equal cards, equal weight, infinite scroll. The card grid solved a real problem and quietly removed a publication's ability to say that one thing matters more than another.
A card grid is a wonderful answer to an awkward question: what do we do when we do not know what is most important? It treats everything equally and scales forever.
It is also an editorial position, and an abdication of one.
Hierarchy is a sentence
A front page that gives one story four columns and another one is making an argument. A page of identical rectangles says only that these items exist and arrived recently.
Design that refuses to rank is not neutral. It has simply moved the decision to whoever publishes most often.
The correction is not a return to print. It is a willingness to make the first item on the page look unambiguously more important than the sixth.