I tend to advocate symmetry, partly out of aesthetic appearance, but mostly from the sense of discipline it induces. Constraining your grid design to fit a symmetrical pattern forces you to think a little bit more about how the solver will fill the grid. There are grids, sufficiently often, where the thematic content is minimal enough that there could have been no major impediment to creating a symmetric grid, except it was easier not to.
But other criteria come into play, albeit less often for me. I was listening to the original piano version of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and glancing down the playlist. And it prompted the usual sort of thing – it’s a recognised list of words in a specific context so it might yield thematic material or, at least, a set of words to kick off an Independent daily grid. This time it led to an Inquisitor.
Some of them turned out to be unexpectedly anagrammable (TUILERIES? LIMOGES?), and the idea was born. It would clearly be sensible to maintain the order since it would structure the identification of the theme and help interpolate the missing elements that would have to appear in the clues. So this left me with specific words, some quite long, in a specific order, to be read sequentially down the grid. Symmetry bowed out.
The issue then was to ensure the right amount of cross-checking. Given the number of unclued entries, it was prudent to keep numbers of unchecked letters low, and I also looked to have a decent number of long down entries stitching the top and bottom halves of the grid together. The appearance of MODEST was not planned, but was a piece of serendipity not to be ignored.
I think it all fell together quite well, but I was happy to revert to symmetry for the next one!
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