The Editorial Grid, Reconsidered

There's a difference between a page with nothing on it and a page that has been edited down to what matters. The first is easy — delete things until the whitespace wins. The second requires knowing what each element is doing and cutting only what isn't. A real grid isn't decoration. It's a set of decisions about hierarchy that a reader can feel even if they never consciously notice it: what to read first, what's a caption versus a claim, where one idea ends and the next begins. Most 'minimal' web design skips this work and calls the resulting emptiness a style.