Today I am going to share with you my biggest design secret. Well, I think it’s a big secret, anyway – it may not turn out to be that unique at all. It all began when I spent a semester in Italy, studying the origins of typography. I discovered the meticulous geometry and beatiful proportions behind the letterforms of Bodoni, the within the margins of hand-scribed Bibles, and in the architecture all around Italy’s beautiful cities.
When I returned to The States, I was starving for more. My design program wasn’t concerned with these aspects of design, but my university’s library had any book I needed about typography and proportion. In addition to my regular class work, I regularly spent 16 hours a day, alone in my apartment, devouring all of these books. My curiousity with the relationship between proportion and beautiful typography became an obsession. I even conducted my own exercise, where I laid out copy from a deodorant stick onto a canvas using nothing but proportionally-derived space to create a hierarchy. A few years later, when I taught a typography class, it was this odd exercise that I adapted into a lesson plan that was published in Ilene Strizver’s Type Rules!.
After all of this experimentation, I, of course had to re-do every project in my portfolio to live up to my new standards. I developed a sort of technique, which I demonstrate in this video. No, I’m not using the golden ratio. I’m simply creating a series of “blocks,” of descending size, based upon the aspect ratio of the “canvas” itself. I then use those blocks to determine margins, the size of elements, and the size of spaces between those elements. Oh, just watch the damn video.
I talk about this technique a little in my Design for the Coder’s Mind presentation, but this video should give you a much clearer picture.
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Image via briangeek
Hey, FREE book!
Best comment (relevant & thought-provoking) will receive a free copy of Kim Elam’s Geometry of Design, a book which I personally find fascinating. It’s full of illuminations of geometric proportion’s influence in beautiful design. Deadline: midnight PST Wednesday, February 18th.
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Mark Schweitzer said,
February 11, 2009 @ 8:29 pm
The video demonstrates the concept very well. What is perhaps most thought-provoking (or distressing, or unfair, or amazing) is that there are designers who’s output neatly demonstrates these principles and who manage to perform this magic unconsciously. Scary.
kadavy said,
February 11, 2009 @ 8:33 pm
Great point, Mark. I forgot to mention that. I very rarely actually execute this method in this manner when I’m really designing, but after doing so meticulously many times – I do find that if I check, my work will inherently have these qualities. I guess Malcom Gladwell is right in “Blink” when he suggests that years of practice can build up intuition in things that are technically complex.
Gary Turovsky said,
February 11, 2009 @ 9:33 pm
I think the golden ratio is really neat. But it’s pretty hard to know how to apply it. I’ve run into the situations where I’ve stared at something pretty, took my thumb and index finger and tried to “squish it” into the golden rectangle/spiral to no avail. So, my hypothesis has been that the proportion works best when there is an obvious set of constraints for an element of the design to work against.
For example, the sunflower has to pack as many seeds into a circular space as possible and with as little energy as possible, using as few rules as possible. So, you got all these little genes in the sunflower saying “Form seed”, “Rotate position by golden mean”, “Loop” (sorry, programmer mind).
I’ve always thought that, if I can take a piece of something I suspect is using the golden ratio and imagine moving it a bit to the left or right and seeing some consequence, then it must be intentional. That is, you can’t just enforce the golden ratio on something irrelevant to the balance of some important factors. I think, in the case of your video, the golden ratio helps differentiate the content (probably more, but that’s what I’m catching consciously).
Anyways, thought I’d get my chance at a free book
By the way, I love the fact that your photo has a golden rectangle thing going on. You really are hooked on this stuff.