One grid, four hundred parks.

In 1977 Vincent Gleason, head of publications at the National Park Service, asked Massimo Vignelli to bring order to the parks’ brochures, which until then had each been designed on their own. Vignelli’s answer was the Unigrid: ten standard formats, all derived from one base sheet and one modular grid.

The plate shows the Yosemite folder of 1986. A black band carries the park’s name across the top, photographs are cropped to the grid’s modules, and the text runs in columns of equal width. The red lines mark the seams between these horizontal bands, the structure every Unigrid format shares.

Because every format came from the same sheet, the parks could print hundreds of different folders on one kind of paper with one short set of rules, and each still looks unmistakably like the Park Service. The black band is on National Park Service brochures to this day.