Break the grid once you own it.

Twen was a German magazine for readers in their twenties, published from 1959 to 1971. Willy Fleckhaus was its art director from the first issue to the last, and it is remembered mostly for how it looked: photographs that ran off the page, headlines at enormous size, and white space used as boldly as ink.

Underneath the variety lay a strict grid of twelve narrow units that could be combined into many column widths. On this cover, from February 1962, the photograph takes the right two thirds of the page and the headline stacks down the left in white capitals, one word to a line.

Photographers such as Will McBride, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon worked for the magazine, and their pictures could be cropped hard and run across whole spreads because the grid beneath them never moved. The surprises worked because the structure stayed the same.