The Guardian digital design style guide

The Guardian digital design style guide
design.theguardian.com

However, I may never understand why grid systems get the amount of reverence that they do. Although there's a certain necessity in having consistency, I can't help but view grid systems has a sort of pseudoscience. Page 2/7 in this style guide shows examples of many page elements that aren't really consistent with their grid. I've also seen plenty of websites with great designs that have different sized margins, or they lack dead space, or their gutters are different sizes, and they look fine. Grids make more sense for print because you have a single size of viewport, vertically and horizontally, therefore you need to have a system for fitting what you can on a single page. On the web, there's infinite vertical space, and most news websites don't take "above the fold" that seriously anymore. Besides, the web developer will inevitably be asked to do some one off special design at some point that violates the grid system. It might as well not exist, but be relegated to a light guideline.

The problem with this focus on design consistency and cosmetic features is that they loose the global view. I pay for the Guardian, and I'm glad to pay for their content, yet I still have to use uBlock to hide some annoying blocks. I've also painfully configured uBlock to disable carrousels (how am I supposed to read anything with images sliding next to it?). And I still prefer their website with JS turned off, though it breaks a few things.

I'd prefer an ugly and inconsistent frontpage, even a plain table of titles, if there was a way to, for instance, display the most important news of the last X=5 days in the category Y=International, etc.