I can’t stop thinking about a scene from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. No, not the bathtub one. It’s the dinner table scene with Isabelle, Theo, their parents, and the kids’ new friend: Matthew. It’s the moment when the father, immersed in a monologue about the unpredictability of inspiration, realizes that Matthew seems more interested in a simple gasoline lighter than in his speech and, vainly perplexed, falls silent before finishing his sentence. Matthew notices and apologizes. And, as if he had been possessed by an inescapable force, he justifies himself.

He tells his friends’ father that he was listening, but that, while doing so, he was also playing with the lighter. That, upon realizing it was disrespectful, he put it down on the table, but that, in doing so, he discovered that the lighter was exactly the same length as the diagonal of the squares on the tablecloth. And that it was then, when he finally noticed that, no matter how he placed it—on its side, upright, flat, closed, open—every dimension of that object perfectly aligned with some other dimension around it. Finally, after proving the validity of his discovery by moving the lighter around to show where it fit, Matthew develops a theory: if we pay close attention to everything around us, we will realize that there is a kind of cosmic harmony between all shapes and all sizes. That, even though we don’t know why it happens, it just does.

So, the family is left speechless. And I, drawn in by a force like the one that possessed Matthew, start spinning that idea around until it clicks into place with another thought that has begun to stir inside my head.

I remember the day Marcel Lladó, the founder of the first studio I worked at, asked me to show him the grid I was using to design whatever it was I was designing. I felt terrified. Not only was I working without a grid and therefore distributing and resizing elements on a page completely by eye, but I also had no idea how the hell to make one visible. I don’t know what he thought at that moment, but I assumed I had been caught. It was useless to keep pretending I had everything under control, so, in a parallel dimension, I pushed my chair back, grabbed my jacket, and never saw those people again. Game over, Ingrid.

But no. Instead of calling me out, Marcel grabbed a chair, rolled it over to my side, and, taking control of my computer, began to deliver one of the best masterclasses on the fundamentals of graphic design I have ever had in my life. He made the grid that divided the document into cells visible and adjusted the settings so that the vertical and horizontal lines at the edges aligned perfectly with the page margins. Zooming in to a 1:0.00008774 scale—unreadable to any human eye—he verified that these margins and those of the grid coincided flawlessly. From there, he began shifting the text boxes in my design toward the intersections outlined by that mesh. But it didn’t stop there. Once all the boxes were in place, he resized them and the letters within them, until absolutely everything fit within the sections of that map. Every element had a place and a dimension that, if we hid the grid, responded to a kind of cosmic harmony—nothing less than the beauty that emerges from mathematics.

That day, I thought Marcel was too obsessed with order. But today, when I come across a document made by someone who, like that version of Ingrid, hasn’t even considered using a grid, I do exactly what he did. Cosmic harmony must be that too: a perfect matrix that keeps us eternally connected to the obsessions of our mentors.

Warm regards from the H6 bus,

Ingrid