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table of content

ILLUSION01 me and my investigation

05 what is beauty? 06 theories of kant

23 beauty ideals 24 past and present

32 Does the media brainwash beauty ideals into us? 42 the golden ratio 46 what is the golden ratio? 56 Golden rectangle in paper sizes 54 Golden rectangle 58 Shaping the page 60 Golden Section finder

67 Final Project

82 Experimental Typography 82 my own fontbibliography

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1

Me and my investigation

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me and my investigation

Together with the people of my class we have chosen two themes: illusion and error. We could chose between the two and I chose illusion.With our own group we’ve done some research about illusion in all kinds of ways. This gave us a global view of illusion and all its ramifications. Then I specified my own research in beauty.

I think it’s really fascinating to know what we consider as beauty and so I ended up reading the theories of Im-manuel Kant. Kant concludes that our taste is subjec-tive. Feelings of pleasure and displeasure are results from empirical judgement. He speaks of beauty and the sublime ; beauty as organized and the sublime as chaos. Kant claims that we never know with certainty whether our aesthetic evaluation has a truth value.

I also compared beauty ideals of the past and the preuni-ware considerate as perfection. This brought me to the subject of the golden ratio. The Golden ratio is a term used throughout the years. It’s dated from the times of Plato and Fibonacci to nowadays’ plastic surgery.

I did a little experiment and I bought a lot of fashion mag-azines. Then I took my scissors and I cut all the heads out. Eventually, my scissors found a pattern. By doing this experiment, I concluded to make experimental work, books, posters, and cards next semester.

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“BEAUTY IS NOT AN IDEAL OF REASON, BUT OF IMAGINATION.” - I.KANT

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what is beauty?theories of kant

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AESTHETICS

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AESTHETICSAn aesthetic judgment, in Kant’s usage, is a judgment which is based on feeling, and in particular on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. According to Kant’s official view there are three kinds of aesthetic judg-ment: judgments of the agreeable, judgments of beauty (or, equivalent-ly, judgments of taste), and judgments of the sublime. However, Kant often uses the expression “aesthetic judgment” in a narrower sense which excludes judgments of the agreeable, and it is with aesthetic judgments in this narrower sense that the “Critique of Aesthetic Judg-ment” is primarily concerned. Such judgments can either be, or fail to be, “pure”; while Kant mostly focusses on the ones which are pure, there are reasons to think that most judgments about art (as opposed to nature) do not count as pure, so that it is important to understand Kant’s views on such judgments as well.The “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” is concerned not only with judgments of the beautiful and the sublime, but also with the production of objects about which such judgments are appropriately made; this topic is discussed under the headings of “fine art” or “beautiful art” [schöne Kunst] and “genius.”The most distinctive part of Kant’s aesthetic theory, and the part which has aroused most interest among commentators, is his account of judgments of beauty, and, more specifically, pure judgments of beauty.

what is beauty?

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In the “Analytic of the Beautiful” with which the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” begins, Kant tries to capture what is distinctive about judg-ments of beauty by describing them under four heads or “moments.” These are as follows: First Moment Judgments of beauty are based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure (Kant also mentions displeas-ure, but this does not figure prominently in his account; for more on this point, see Section 2.3.6 below). The pleasure, however, is of a distinc-tive kind: it is disinterested, which means that it does not depend on the subject’s having a desire for the object, nor does it generate such a desire. The fact that judgments of beauty are based on feeling rather than “objective sensation” (e.g., the sensation of a thing’s colour) dis-tinguishes them from cognitive judgments based on perception (e.g., the judgment that a thing is green). But the disinterested character of the feeling distinguishes them from other judgments based on feeling. In particular, it distinguishes them from (i) judgments of the agreeable, which are the kind of judgment expressed by saying simply that one likes something or finds it pleasing (for example, food or drink), and (ii) judgments of the good, including judgments both about the moral goodness of something and about its goodness for particular non-moral ends. Second Moment Judgments of beauty have, or make a claim to, “universality” or “universal validity.” That is, in making a judgment of beauty about an object, one takes it that everyone else who perceives the object ought also to judge it to be beautiful, and, relatedly, to share one’s pleasure in it. But the universality is not “based on concepts.” That is, one’s claim to agreement does not rest on the subsumption of the object under a concept (as for example, the claim to agreement made by the judgment that something is green rests on the ascription to the object of the property of being green, and hence its subsumption un-der the concept green). Relatedly, judgments of beauty cannot, despite their universal validity, be proved: there are no rules by which someone can be compelled to judge that something is beautiful. The fact that judgments of beauty are universally valid constitutes a further feature (in addition to the disinterestedness of the pleasure on which they are based) distinguishing them from judgments of agreeable. For in claiming simply that one likes something, one does not claim that everyone else ought to like it too. But the fact that their universal validity is not based on concepts distinguishes judgments of beauty from non-evaluative cognitive judgments and judgments of the good, both of which make a claim to universal validity that is based on concepts.

JUDGEMENT OF BEAUTY

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It should be noted that later, in the “Antinomy of Taste,” Kant does de-scribe the universality of judgments of beauty as resting on a concept, but it is an “indeterminate concept,” and not the kind of concept which figures in cognition.Third Moment Unlike judgments of the good, judgments of the beautiful do not presuppose an end or purpose [Zweck] which the object is taken to satisfy. (This is closely related to the point that their universality is not based on concepts). However, they nonetheless involve the representa-tion of what Kant calls “purposiveness” [Zweckmässigkeit]. Because this representation of purposiveness does not involve the ascription of an end, Kant calls the purposiveness which is represented “merely for-mal purposiveness” or “the form of purposiveness.” He describes it as perceived both in the object itself and in the activity of imagination and understanding in their engagement with the object. (For more on this activity, see the discussion of the “free play of the faculties” in Section 2.2; for more on the notion of purposiveness, see Section 3.1).Fourth Moment Judgments of beauty involve reference to the idea of necessity, in the following sense: in taking my judgment of beauty to be universally valid, I take it, not that everyone who perceives the object will share my pleasure in it and (relatedly) agree with my judgment, but that everyone ought to do so. I take it, then, that my pleasure stands in a “necessary” relation to the object which elicits it, where the neces-sity here can be described (though Kant himself does not use the term) as normative. But, as in the case of universal validity, the necessity is not based on concepts or rules (at least, not concepts or rules that are determinate, that is, of a kind which figure in cognition; as noted earlier in this section, Kant describes it, in the Antinomy of Taste, as resting on an indeterminate concept). Kant characterizes the necessity more posi-tively by saying that it is “exemplary,” in the sense that one’s judgment itself serves as an example of how everyone ought to judge.

what is beauty?

JUDGEMENT OF BEAUTY

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Running through Kant’s various characterizations of judgments of beauty is a basic dichotomy between two apparently opposed sets of features. On the one hand, judgments of beauty are based on feeling, they do not depend on subsuming the object under a concept (in particular, the concept of an end which such an object is supposed to satisfy), and they cannot be proved. This combination of features seems to suggest that judgments of beauty should be assimilated to judgments of the agreeable. On the other hand, however, judgments of beauty are unlike judgments of the agreeable in not involving desire for the object; more importantly and centrally, they make a normative claim to everyone’s agreement. These features seem to suggest that they should be assimilated, instead, to objective cognitive judgments. In claiming that judgments of beauty have both sets of fea-tures, Kant can be seen as reacting equally against the two main oppos-ing traditions in eighteenth-century aesthetics: the “empiricist” tradition of aesthetics represented by Hume, Hutcheson and Burke, on which a judg-ment of beauty is an expression of feeling without cognitive content, and the “rationalist” tradition of aesthetics represented by Baumgarten and Meier, on which a judgment of beauty consists in the cognition of an object as having an objective property. Kant’s insistence that there is an alternative to these two views, one on which judgments of beauty are both based on feeling and make a claim to universal validity, is probably the most distinc-tive aspect of his aesthetic theory. But this insistence confronts him with the obvious problem of how the two features, or sets of features, are to be reconciled. As Kant puts it: “how is a judgment possible which, merely from one’s own feeling of pleasure in an object, independent of its concept, judges this pleasure as attached to the representation of the same object in every other subject, and does so a priori, i.e., without having to wait for the assent of others?” (§36, 288)The argument constituting Kant’s official answer to this question is presented in the section entitled “Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments,” in particular in §38, but versions of the argu-ment are presented in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” in particular in §9 and §22. The argument in all of its forms relies on the claim, introduced in §9, that pleasure in the beautiful depends on the “free play” or “free harmony” of the faculties of imagination and understanding. In the Critique of Pure Reason, imagination is described as “synthesizing the manifold of intuition” under the governance of rules that are prescribed by the under-standing: the outcome of this is cognitive perceptual experience of objects as having specific empirical features. The rules prescribed by the under-standing, are, or correspond to, particular concepts which are applied to the object. For example, when a manifold is synthesized in accordance with the concepts green and square, the outcome is a perceptual experience in which the object is perceived as green and square. But now in the Critique of Judgment, Kant suggests that imagination and understanding can stand in a different kind of relationship, one in which imagination’s activity harmo-nizes with the understanding but without imagination’s being constrained or governed by understanding. In this relationship, imagination and under-standing in effect do what is ordinarily involved in the bringing of objects

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under concepts, and hence in the perception of objects as having empirical features: but they do this without bringing the object under any concept in particular. So rather than perceiving the object as green or square, the subject whose faculties are in free play responds to it perceptually with a state of mind which is non-conceptual, and specifically a feeling of disinter-ested pleasure. It is this kind of pleasure which is the basis for a judgment of beauty. Kant appeals to this account of pleasure in the beautiful in order to argue for its universal communicability: to argue, that is, that a subject who feels such a pleasure, and thus judges the object to be beautiful, is entitled to demand that everyone else feel a corresponding pleasure and thus agree with her judgment of beauty. For, he claims, the free play of the faculties manifests the subjective condition of cognition in general (see for example §9, 218; §21, 238; §38, 290). We are entitled to claim that every-one ought to agree with our cognitions: if I perceive an object to be green and square, I am entitled to claim that everyone else ought to perceive it as green and square. But for this demand for agreement to be possible, he suggests, it must also be possible for me to demand universal agreement for the subjective condition of such cognitions. If I can take it that everyone ought to share my perception of an object as green or square, then I must also be entitled to take it that everyone ought to share a perception of the object in which my faculties are in free play, since the free play is no more than a manifestation of what is in general required for an object’s being perceived as green or square in the first place. The most serious objection to Kant’s argument can be put in the form of a dilemma; see for example Guyer (1979, p. 297), Meerbote (1982, pp. 81ff.) , Allison (2001, pp. 184-192), Rind (2002). Either the free play of the faculties is involved in all cogni-tive perceptual experience, or it is not. If it is not, then the central inference does not seem to go through. From the fact that I can demand agreement for my experience of an object as, say, green or square, it does not follow that I can demand agreement for a state in which my faculties are in free play, since the free play is not required for experiencing an object as green or square. But if it is involved in all cognitive perceptual experience, then it would seem that every object should be perceived as beautiful, and this is plainly not the case. A number of commentators have taken this objection, or considerations related to it, to be fatal to Kant’s claim that judgments of beauty are universally valid: see for example Meerbote (cited earlier in this paragraph) and Guyer 1979, pp. 319-324. Indeed, at least one commentator has taken the apparent weakness of Kant’s argument as an indication that Kant does not intend it to provide a complete answer to the question of how judgments of beauty are possible, but that he means instead to ground the possibility of such judgments on morality rather than on the conditions of cognition (Elliott [1968]; see also Section 2.3.4 below). But the argument has been defended by Ameriks (1982) (see also Section 2.3.5 below) and Allison (cited earlier in this paragraph); moreover Guyer (2003a, p. 60n.15) has recently expressed some doubt about his earlier (1979) rejection of the argument. The assessment of the objection just noted, and of Kant’s “deduction of taste” more generally, is complicated by a number of funda-mental interpretive issues, which are discussed in the next section.

what is beauty?

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INTERPRETIVE ISSUESThis section describes six issues which have arisen in connection with Kant’s account of pure judgments of beauty, and which are relevant to the assessment of his argument for the possibility of such judgments. There is an extensive secondary literature on these and related issues. Some refer-ences to this literature are given below; a useful source of further refer-ences is Allison (2001), which in addition to offering a distinctive interpreta-tion of Kant’s aesthetics, also provides an extensive guide to recent discussions. Pleasure and Judgment. What is the relation between the feel-ing of pleasure and the judgment that the object is beautiful? Kant describes the judgment of beauty as “based on” a feeling of pleasure, and as claiming that everyone ought to share the subject’s feeling of pleasure, or, as he puts it, as claiming the “universal communicability” of the pleasure. This seems to imply that the pleasure is felt antecedently to the judgment of beauty. But in the crucial §9, which Kant describes as providing “the key to the critique of taste,” Kant suggests that the opposite is the case: the “merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object” both “precedes” and “is the ground of” the pleasure (218). Crawford addresses this apparent paradox by distinguishing the “judging” of the object which, according to §9, precedes the pleasure in it, from the judgment of beauty proper, which is based on the pleasure (1974, pp. 69-74). A distinction of this kind is de-veloped in detail by Guyer, who draws on passages elsewhere in the text to defend the view that a judgment of beauty results from two distinct acts of reflecting judgment, the first identifiable with the free play of the facul-ties and resulting in a feeling of pleasure, the second an act of reflection on the pleasure which results in the claim that the pleasure is universally com-municable. (See his 1979, especially pp. 110-119 and pp. 151-160; for a related discussion of the “key to the critique of taste,” see his 1982). While most commentators read the relevant paragraphs of §9 as requiring some kind of distinction along these lines, an alternative reading is offered by Ginsborg (see especially 1990, ch. 1, and 1991), who takes the judgment of beauty to involve a single, self-referential act of judging which claims its own universal validity with respect to the object and which is phenomeno-logically manifested in a feeling of pleasure. This view, like that of Aquila (1982), implies that the pleasure is not felt antecedently to the judgment of beauty but is, rather, identical with it. The issue raised by §9 is further dis-cussed in Allison (2001, pp. 110-118) and in a recent symposium on Alli-son’s book (Longuenesse 2003, Ginsborg 2003 and Allison 2003); see also Longuenesse (forthcoming). The Free Play of Imagination and Understand-ing. What is it for the faculties to be in “free play”? Kant describes the im-agination in the free play as conforming to the general conditions for the application of concepts to objects that are presented to our senses, yet without any particular concept being applied. Because of Kant’s view that concepts are, or at least correspond to, rules by which imagination “synthe-sizes” or organizes the data of sense-perception, this amounts to saying

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INTERPRETIVE ISSUESwhat is beauty?

that imagination functions in a rule-governed way but without being gov-erned by any rule in particular. The free play thus manifests, in Kant’s terms, “free lawfulness” or “lawfulness without a law.” But there is an apparent paradox in these characterizations which is left unaddressed by Kant’s own, largely metaphorical, explanations. It is left to commentators to try to ex-plain how such an activity is intelligible and why, if it is indeed intelligible, it should give rise to, or be experienced as, a feeling of pleasure. Some com-mentators try to make sense of the free play by appealing to the phenom-enology of aesthetic experience, for example to the kind of experience in-volved in appreciating an abstract painting, where the subject might imaginatively relate the various elements of the painting to one another and perceive them as having an order and unity which is no conceptual; see for example Bell (1987, p. 237) and Crowther (1989, p. 56). Others try to find a place for it in the context of Kant’s theory of the imagination as presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. Two contrasting accounts along these lines are those of Guyer, who identifies the free play with the first two stages of the “three-fold synthesis” described by Kant in the first edition Transcen-dental Deduction (Guyer 1979, pp. 85-86), and of Makkreel (1990, pp. 49-58), for whom the free play is an activity of schematizing pure concepts without the involvement of empirical concepts. While there have been a great variety of accounts suggested in recent years (for a partial survey, see Guyer forthcoming), they almost all share the assumption that the free play is distinct from the judgment of beauty. This assumption, however, is re-jected by Ginsborg, who identifies the free play as a non-conceptual mental state which involves a claim to its own universal communicability with re-spect to the object (1997); this means, on her reading, that it is to be identi-fied with the judgment ofbeauty. The Intentionality of the Pleasure. Does the feeling of pleasure in a judgment of beauty have intentional content? According to Guyer, the answer is no (see especially 1979, pp. 99-119). Al-though Kant sometimes describes pleasure as awareness of the free play of the faculties, Guyer takes the relation between the free play and the feeling of pleasure to be merely causal. The pleasure is “opaque”: while one can come to recognize that one’s feeling of pleasure is due to the free play, this is not because the pleasure makes one immediately aware of it, but rather because reflection on the causal history of one’s pleasure can lead one to conclude that it was not sensory or due to the satisfaction of a desire and hence (by elimination) must have been due to the free play. While many commentors follow Guyer on this point, opposing views have been taken by e.g., Aquila (1982), Ginsborg (1990, ch. 1, and 1991), Allison (2001, in particular pp. 53-54, p. 69 and pp. 122-123) and Zuckert (2002). The Character of the Claim to Agreement. What kind of claim to agreement is made by a judgment of beauty? Kant says that a judgment of beauty de-mands agreement in the same way that an objective cognitive judgment demands agreement (see e.g., Introduction VII, 191 and §6, 211). But one

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might still raise a question about the character of the demand, either be-cause there is a question about what it is for a cognitive judgment to claim agreement, or because it is not clear that the claim can in fact be the same, given that in the aesthetic case one is claiming that others share one’s feel-ing. Guyer 1979 argues that the claim should be understood as a rational expectation or ideal prediction: someone who judges an object to be beau-tiful is claiming that under ideal circumstances everyone will share her pleasure (1979, pp. 139-147 and pp. 162-164). Rogerson (1982) criticizes the rational expectation interpretation, arguing instead that a judgment of beauty makes a moral demand on others to appreciate the object’s beauty. A third option is that the demand is genuinely normative (as opposed to predictive), yet without being a moral demand. This option is developed and defended in Rind (2000); it is also assumed, with varying degrees of explic-itness, by a number of other commentators, including Allison (2001; see especially p. 159 and pp. 178-179). The question of whether the demand is a moral one has immediate implications for how Kant’s argument for the universal validity of judgments of beauty is to be understood. Most com-mentators understand it along the lines sketched in 2.1 above, as relying only on assumptions about the conditions of cognition. But some commen-tators, for example Elliott (1968), Crawford (1974), Rogerson (1986) and Kemal (1986) have taken an appeal to morality to play a central role in the argument. Is Beauty Objective? Should judgments of beauty be regarded as objective? Ameriks has argued (1982, 1983) that in spite of Kant’s claim that judgments of beauty are “subjectively grounded,” they are nonethe-less objective in the same sense that judgments of colour and other sec-ondary qualities are objective. Similar views are proposed by Savile (1981) and Kulenkampff (1990); see also the references offered by Ameriks at (2003, 307n.1). The claim is challenged by Ginsborg (1998); for discussion see Ameriks (1998, 2000) and Allison (2001, 128-129). Negative Judgments of Beauty. Kant’s discussion of judgments of beauty focuses almost exclusively on the positive judgment that an object is beau-tiful, and relatable, of the feeling of pleasure in a beautiful object. He has very little to say about the judgment that an object is not beautiful, or about the displeasure associated with judging an object to be ugly. (As noted in Section 2.7 below, he does take the appreciation of the sublime to involve a kind of displeasure, but this seems to be a different kind from the dis-pleasure that might be involved in judging something to be ugly.) Does his treatment allow for negative judgments of beauty, either that an object is not beautiful or that is ugly? The importance of the question has been em-phasized by Allison (2001), who takes it to be a criterion for a satisfactory interpretation of Kant’s theory of taste that it allow for negative judgments of beauty (2001, p. 72; see also pp. 184-186); others who have emphasized the need to consider the role of the ugly in Kant’s account of aesthetics in-clude Hudson (1991) and Wenzel (1999). Some commentators have denied that Kant acknowledges the possibility of such judgments (for references, see the endnotes to Allison 2001, pp. 184-186; Guyer 2005a, ch. 7). an-other view is that while Kant allows for them, they should not be treated symmetrically with positive judgments of beauty (Ginsborg 2004).

what is beauty?

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CRITICISMS

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CRITICISMSKant’s account of judgments of beauty has been criticized on the grounds that the argument for their universal validity, that is the De-duction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments, is unsuccessful. Criticisms have also been raised against various aspects of Kant’s characterization of judgments of beauty in the Analytic of the Beautiful. Objections have been raised in particular to Kant’s view that judgments of beauty are disinterested, and to his supposed commitment to aesthetic formalism (the view that all that matters for aesthetic appreciation is the abstract formal pattern manifested by the object, that is, the way in which its elements are interrelated in space and/or time). For discussion of the questions of disinterestedness and formalism, see Guyer (1979, chs. 5 and 6), and on the question of formalism, ch. 6) and Allison (2001, chs. 4 and 5). Typically objections to Kant’s view of pleasure as disinterested appeal to the apparently obvious fact that we do in fact take an inter-est in the preservation of beautiful objects (see for example Crawford 1974, p. 53). For a different kind of objection based on an appeal to the cognitive role of aesthetic judging, see Pillow (forthcoming).Kant has also been criticized for a view that is taken to be a consequence of the thesis that judgments of beauty are disinterested, namely the view that aesthetic experience requires a special attitude of “psychical distance” or “detachment” from the object appreciated: this criticism is gener-ally taken to be implicit in Dickie’s well-known (1964) discussion of the “myth of the aesthetic attitude.” Zangwill (1992) argues that this criti-cism is misplaced.Kant’s view that the pleasure in a beautiful object is non-conceptual has been taken to commit him to the objectionable view that the capacity to make conceptual distinctions can play no role in the appreciation of beauty. This criticism is addressed by Janaway (1997).

what is beauty?

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FREE AND ADHERENT BEAUTY

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FREE AND ADHERENT BEAUTY

This article so far has been concerned only with “pure” judgments of beauty. But Kant also allows for judgments of beauty which fall short of being pure. Judgments of beauty can fail to be pure in two ways. (a) They can be influenced by the object’s sensory or emotional appeal, that is, they can involve “charm” [Reiz] or emotion. (b) They can be contin-gent on a certain concept’s applying to the object, so that the object is judged, not as beautiful tout court, but as beautiful qua belonging to this or that kind. The second kind of impurity is discussed in §16 in connec-tion with a distinction between “free” [frei] beauty and “adherent” or “dependent” [anhängend] beauty.The distinction is important because Kant suggests that all judgments of beauty about representational art are judgments of adherent rather than of free beauty, and hence that they are all impure. While some art works can be “free beauties,” the examples Kant gives are all of non-representational art: “designs a la grecque, foliage for borders or on wallpaper…fantasias in music,” and indeed, Kant adds, all music without a text (§16, 229). It might be sup-posed from this that Kant’s core account of judgments of beauty is only peripherally applicable to art, which would make it largely irrelevant to the concerns of contemporary aesthetics. However, this consequence is debatable. For example, Allison argues that judgments of depend-ent beauty contain, as a component, a pure judgment of beauty. The purity of this core judgment is not undermined by its figuring in a more complex evaluation which takes into account the object’s falling under a concept (2001, pp. 140-141).Kant’s suggestion that representational art has “adherent” rather than “free” beauty, and that judgments about such art fail to be pure, might also invite the objection that Kant takes nonrepresentational art to be superior to representational art, so that, say, wallpaper designs are aesthetically more valuable than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This objection is challenged by Schaper (1978, ch. 4, reprinted in Guyer 2003) and by Guyer (2005a, chs. 4 and 5).

what is beauty?

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THE SUBLIMEKant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. In the case of both notions, the experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature (§28, 261).In the case of the mathemati-cally sublime, the feeling of reason’s superiority over nature takes the form, more specifically, of a feeling of reason’s superiority to imagination, conceived of as the natural capacity required for sensory apprehension, including the ap-prehension of the magnitudes of empirically given things. We have this feeling when we are confronted with something that is so large that it overwhelms imagination’s capacity to comprehend it. In such a situation imagination strives to comprehend the object in accordance with a demand of reason, but fails to do so. “Just because there is in our imagination a striving to advance to the in-finite, while in our reason there lies a claim to absolute totality, as to a real idea, the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating the magnitude of the things in the sensible world [viz., imagination] awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us” (§25, 250). The fact that we are capable, through reason, of think-ing infinity as a whole, “indicates a faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense” (§26, 254). While Kant’s discussion of the mathematically sublime mentions, apparently as examples, the Pyramids in Egypt and St. Pe-ter’s Basilica in Rome (§26, 252), he claims that the most appropriate examples are of things in nature. More specifically, they must be natural things the con-cept of which does not involve the idea of an end (§26, 252-253): this rules out animals, the concept of which is connected with the idea of biological function, but it apparently includes mountains and the sea (§26, 256).In the case of the dynamically sublime, the feeling of reason’s superiority to nature is more direct than in the mathematical case. Kant says that we consider nature as “dynami-cally sublime” when we consider it as “a power that has no dominion over us” (§28, 260). We have the feeling of the dynamically sublime when we experi-ence nature as fearful while knowing ourselves to be in a position of safety and hence without in fact being afraid. In this situation “the irresistibility of [na-ture’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature…whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion” (§28, 261-262). Kant’s examples include over-hanging cliffs, thunder clouds, volcanoes and hurricanes (§28, 261).The feeling associated with the sublime is a feeling of pleasure in the superiority of our rea-son over nature, but it also involves displeasure. In the case of the mathemati-cally sublime, the displeasure comes from the awareness of the inadequacy

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THE SUBLIMEof our imagination; in the dynamical case it comes from the awareness of our physical powerlessness in the face of nature’s might. Kant is not consistent in his descriptions of how the pleasure and the displeasure are related, but one characterization describes them as alternating: the “movement of the mind” in the representation of the sublime “may be compared to a vibration, i.e., to a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object” (§27, 258). Kant also describes the feeling of the sublime as a “pleasure which is possible only by means of a displeasure” (§27, 260) and as a “negative lik-ing” (General Remark following §29, 269). He also appears to identify it with the feeling of respect, which in his practical philosophy is associated with rec-ognition of the moral law (§27, 257).Judgments of the sublime are like judg-ments of beauty in being based on feeling, more specifically on pleasure or liking. They are also like judgments of beauty in claiming the universal validity of the pleasure, where that claim is understood as involving necessity (every-one who perceives the object ought to share the feeling) (§29, 266). But as we have seen, the pleasure is different in that it involves a negative element. The following differences should also be noted:(particularly emphasized by Kant) In making a judgment of the sublime, we regard the object as “contrapurposive,” rather than purposive, for the faculties of imagination and judgment (§23, 245). While judgments of the sublime do involve the representation of purposive-ness, the purposiveness differs from that involved in a judgment of beauty in two ways. (a) It is not the object, but the aesthetic judgment itself which is rep-resented as purposive. (b) The aesthetic judgment is represented as purposive not for imagination or judgment, but for reason (§27, 260) or for the “whole vocation of the mind” (§27, 259). The claim to universal validity made by a judgment of the sublime rests, not on the universal validity of the conditions of cognition, but rather on the universal validity of moral feeling (§29, 255-256). While we can correctly call objects beautiful, we cannot properly call them sublime (§23, 245); sublimity strictly speaking “is not contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind” (§28, 264). While judgments of beauty involve a relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding, the faculties brought into relation in a judgment of the sublime are imagination and reason (§29, 266). The importance of the sublime within Kant’s aesthetic theory is a matter of dispute.

what is beauty?

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“WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL IS GOOD, AND WHAT IS GOOD WILL SOON BE BEAU-TYFUL.” - SAPPHO

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Beauty ideals

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PRE-HISTORY

GREEK ANDROMAN

VENUS FIGURE

BIG CURVES

FIRM HIPS

BIG BUTT

BIG BREASTS

BEAUTY IS GODLINESS

DISCOBOLUS

YOUTHFUL AND CURVY

MOTHERHOOD

SLIM WAISTE

WHITE MAKE-UP

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Beauty ideals

GOLDEN RATIO

MIDDLEAGES

PYTHAGORAS

BEAUTY AND MATHS

1.61803399

SYMMETRIC

PROPORTIONED

RELIGION

BEAUTY = SINASCETIC

ROUND BELLY

SMALL BREASTSLOCATED HIGHER

LILY WHITE BLOND HAIR

WIDE HIPSBIG BUTT

BEAUTY IDEALS FROM PRE-HISTORY...

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RE-NAISSANCE

BAROQUE AND ROCOCO

SMALL BREASTSHIGHER LOCATED

V - SHAPE

SLIM WAISTEWIDE HIPS

FOREHEAD

BLONDE HAIRWHITE SKIN

CHUBBY = WEALTH

PALE SKINSMALL BREASTS

BLUE MAKE-UP= BLUE BLOOD

ROCOCO = PETITE

ROCOCO = CORSET

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FIN DESIECLE

ROARING TWENTIES

HIGH WAISTE

STRAPPRED BODY

BUTT = NOT IMPORTANT

MORE NATURAL STRAPPED BODY

FOCUS ON BREASTSAND BUTT

OPPOSITION AGAINST IDEALS

BOYISH FIGURE

TIED BREASTSSHORT HAIR

MARILYN MONROETWIGGY

SKINNY = NEW IDEAL

Beauty ideals

TO ROARING TWENTIES

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“A MOMENT ON THE LIPS, FOREVER ON THE HIPS.”

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“AN APPLE A DAY KEEPS THE FAT AWAY.”

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“CINEMA, RADIO,TELEVISION,MAGAZINES ARE A SCHOOL OF INATTENTION: PEOPLE LOOK WITHOUT SEEING, LISTEN WITHOUT HEARING.”- R. Bresson

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Does the media brainwash beauty ideals into us?

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According to Leonard Eron, senior research scientist at the University of Michigan, “Television alone is re-sponsible for 10 percent of youth violence.” This is only 10 percent, and not including the effect it has on body image, sexuality and eating disorders. Youth everywhere are being influenced by magazines and movies on television, and not in good way. Each mov-ie or magazine depicts some sort of image for the youth to imitate.

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INFLUENCE OF MEDIA

Brainwash of media

What is the proper definition of “Beauty”? The women displayed on television everyday are young, tall and thin. This description reminds me of a Barbie doll. Fat, short and old are not seen as very attractive characteristics. It very rarely is someone with those qualities described as beautiful. Because of the women on television, girls everywhere worry about losing those extra 10 pounds, wearing those nice shiny heals to look taller, or putting on that extra make-up to look younger. According to media activist Jean Kilbourne, “Women are sold to the diet industry by the magazines we read and the television programs we watch, almost all of which make us feel anxious about our weight.” Excessive exer-cise and dieting have been over-advertised in newspapers, commercials, and magazines, causing women to be more self-conscious about their body. These women then try to compete, with the assumption that they will attract more men that way. We owe most of this to the film industry for showing all beauti-ful women as the skinny, Barbie-like ones. Canadian researcher Gregory Fouts reports that, “Over three-quarters of the female characters in TV situation com-edies are underweight, and only one in twenty are above average in size.”The disturbing part of this is that no matter how hard many women try to achieve that level of “beauty,” only a small percentage succeed, causing the rest more harm that good. Research shows that if a girl did look like a Barbie doll, she would not last very long. Her body would not be able to support itself from how thin it is, and she would die.In addition, movies show that the “fat” woman is ugly and hurtful comments such as, “Why don’t you just wear a sack?” are used. These, meant to hurt the person’s feelings, are unintentionally giving the audience ideas that there is something wrong with being a little on the heavy side.Not only that, but heavy women are rejected from certain jobs because of how they look, such as television broadcasting. If a woman is not thin, they do not hire her, telling her she will discourage the audience from watching. The “thin woman” standard is not only used for broadcasting, but for selling food and cars. The usual advertisement for cars has a woman leaning on it, wearing immodest clothing. The same woman is also the waitress that serves that great new plate.As long as movies and shows display “thin, beautiful” women, girls everywhere will continue to harm themselves through binge-eating, anorexia and excessive exercise without realizing it. Girls will lose whatever self-esteem they have and their character will become shallow to the point where all that matters is looking good, rather than having a good personality.

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Simply, many people see beauty in many different ways. This becomes a complex question when faced with different views and opinions of what the definition of beauty is or consist of. Culture plays an integral part of how individuals and society de-fines beauty within their cultural boundaries. Beauty in China can mean differently in India. As we look through different cultures and time periods, we see that beauty comes in all distinct shapes and sizes. While that may be the case, the majority can agree that beauty always identifies a person.

Brainwash of media

BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

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““GEOMETRY HAS TWO GREAT TREAS-URES: ONE IS THE THEOREM OF PY-THAGORAS; THE OTHER, THE DIVISION OF A LINE INTO EXTREME AND MEAN RATIO. THE FIRST WE MAY COMPARE TO A MEASURE OF GOLD; THE SECOND WE MAY NAME A PRECIOUS JEWEL.” - Johannes Kepler

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The Golden Ratio

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PHIDIAS(490–430 BC)

made the Parthenon statues that seem to embody the golden ratio.

PLATO(427–347 BC)

in his Timaeus, describes five pos-sible regular solids (the Platonic solids: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron), some of which are related to the golden ratio.

EUCLID(c. 325–c. 265 BC)

In his Elements, gave the first re-corded definition of the golden ra-tio, which he called, as translated into English, “extreme and mean ratio”.

FIBONACCI(1170–1250)

Mentioned the numerical series now named after him in his Liber Abaci; the ratio of sequential ele-ments of the Fibonacci sequence approaches the golden ratio as-ymptotically.

PACIOLI(1445–1517)

Defines the golden ratio as the “divine proportion” in his Divina Proportione.

BONNET(1720–1793)

Points out that in the spiral phyl-lotaxis of plants going clockwise and counter-clockwise were fre-quently two successive Fibonacci series.

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The Golden Ratio

In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity irrational mathematical constant, approxi-mately 1.61803398874989.Other names frequently used for the golden ratio are the golden section (Latin: sectio aurea) and golden mean. Other terms encountered include extreme and mean ratio, medial section, di-vine proportion, divine section (Latin: sectio divina), golden proportion, golden cut, golden number, and mean of Phidias. In this article the golden ratio is de-noted by the Greek lowercase letter phi, while its re-ciprocal.At least since the Renaissance, many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approxi-mate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing (see Applica-tions and observations below). Mathematicians have studied the golden ratio because of its unique and interesting properties. The golden ratio is also used in the analysis of financial markets, in strategies such as Fibonacci retracement.

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KEPLER(1571–1630)

Proves that the golden ratio is the limit of the ratio of consecu-tive Fibonacci numbers,[18] and describes the golden ratio as a “precious jewel”: “Geometry has two great treasures: one is the Theorem of Pythagoras, and the other the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio; the first we may compare to a meas-ure of gold, the second we may name a precious jewel.” These two treasures are combined in the Kepler triangle. OHM

(1792–1872) Is believed to be the first to use the term goldener Schnitt (gold-en section) to describe this ratio, in 1835.

LUCAS(1842–1891)

Gives the numerical sequence now known as the Fibonacci se-quence its present name.

BARR (20th century)

Suggests the Greek letter phi, the initial letter of Greek sculptor Phidias’s name, as a symbol for the golden ratio.

PENROSE(b.1931)

Discovered a symmetrical pat-tern that uses the golden ratio in the field of aperiodic tilings, which led to new discoveries about quasicrystals.

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Phi is a mysterious number which has some relat-ed quantities and shapes, and it appears in the pro-portions of the human body, and other animals’, in plants, in DNA, in solar system, in art and architec-ture, in music, etc. Nevertheless, it had been debat-ed on whether or not it is a natural beauty-maker ever since the first renowned experience that a German physicist and psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner conducted in the 1860s. His experience is simple: a person needs to choose the most pleasing rectangle among ten rectangles that are placed in front of him, and all have different ratios of length to width. The re-sult shows that 76% of all choices are the three rec-tangles having ratio of 1.75, 1.62, and 1.50, which are really close to the value of pie (approximately 1.618). Is there enough evidence to show the result? Maybe not, many psychologist have repeated similar experi-ments ever since, the results are rather conflicting, and inaccurate. Later on, this topic has extended to the determination of the origin of facial attractive-ness.Dr. Stephen Marquardt is a former plastic sur-geon, has used the golden section and some of its relatives to make a mask that he claims that is the most beautiful shape a human face can ever have, it used decagons and pentagons as its function that embodies phi in all their dimensions. Dr. Marquardt has been studying on human’s facial beauty for many years. According to him, beauty this word can be de-fined as a mechanism to ensure humans recognize and are attracted by others. The most beautiful faces are just are the ones that are the most easily recog-nizable as human.A perfect smile: the front two teeth form a golden rectangle (which is said to be one of the most visually satisfying of forms, as it is formed

The Golden Ratio

with sides of 1 and 1.618). There is also a Golden Ra-tio in the height to width of the center two teeth. And the ratio of the width of the two center teeth to those next to them is phi. And, the ratio of the width of the smile to the third tooth from the center is also phi.The windpipe divides into two main bronchi, one long (the left) and the other short (the right). This asym-metrical division continues into the subsequent sub-divisions of the bronchi. It was determined that in all these divisions the proportion of the short bronchus to the long was always 1/1.618.Human health is af-fected by facial proportions. Biologically, people who have long faces have more chances of having breath-ing problem, suffering from sleep apnea. And People with shorter faces tend to have abnormal jaw devel-opment due to the excessive pressure on the jaw joint, suffering from headaches because their jaws are positioned in a manner that can restrict blood flow to the brain.

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Studies show that when we recognize a face as “beautiful” we are actually making a judgement about the health and vitality of that individual. We in-terpret facial symmetry (the similarity of left and right halves of a face) and the smoothness of the skin to mean that a person has good genes and has been free from diseases. This is part of what we mean by “beautiful” but it is just the beginning.

Studies show that when we recognize a face as “beautiful” we are actually making a judgement about the health and vitality of that individual. We in-terpret facial symmetry (the similarity of left and right halves of a face) and the smoothness of the skin to mean that a person has good genes and has been free from diseases. This is part of what we mean by

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Stephen Marquardt has derived a mask from the golden ratio that he claims represents the “ideal” facial ar-chetype. Many have found his mask convincing, including cosmetic surgeons. However, Marquardt’s mask is associated with numerous problems. The method used to examine goodness of fit with the proportions in the mask is faulty. The mask is ill-suited for non-European populations, especially sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians. The mask also appears to approximate the face shape of masculinized European women. Given that the general public strongly and overwhelmingly prefers above average facial femininity in women, white women seeking aesthetic facial surgery would be ill-advised to aim toward a better fit with Marquardt’s mask. This article aims to show the proper way of assessing goodness of fit with Marquardt’s mask, to address the shape of the mask as it pertains to masculinity-femininity, and to discuss the broader issue of an objective assessment of facial attractiveness.Generalized Procrustes analysis is used to show how goodness of fit with Marquardt’s mask can be assessed. Thin-plate spline analysis is used to illustrate visually how sample faces, including northwestern European averages, differ from Marquardt’s mask.Marquardt’s mask best describes the facial proportions of masculinized white women as seen in fashion models.Marquardt’s mask does not appear to describe “ideal” face shape even for white women because its propor-tions are inconsistent with the optimal preferences of most people, especially with regard to femininity.

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Found in nature as well as the work of man, the golden rectangle or golden section is a visually pleas-ing geometric shape with specific proportions. The measurement of 1.61803398874989…, known as the Golden Mean or Phi, a sequence of numbers known as the Fibonacci Series, and the Golden Rec-tangle are all mathematically connected. However, for the layperson the primary ratio of interest is 3:5 or 5:3 — the Golden Proportion.The question of perfection is always an interesting one, and this is as true in design as anything else. However, the question of what constitutes perfec-tion is certainly up for debate. In this article, we will look at both this question and the concept of the golden ratio, as we formulate the notion of an imper-fect perfection.As designers, many of us are frequently concerned with achieving some form of perfection in our work. Yet, even as we strive for perfection at some level, the question that invariably arises is: what is perfec-tion? Or, more specifically, what is perfection in de-sign? There are all kinds of philosophical and theoreti-cal treatises on the nature of perfection, specifically in the realm of aesthetics.In Western culture, probably one of the most well known examples of a study of perfection in propor-tion is Leonardo’s very famous Vitruvian Man.

Accompanied by a variety of notes, this particular drawing visualizes Leonardo’s own theoretical con-cept of the proportions of the perfect human male, though it should be noted that much of Leonardo’s own thinking was guided by the writings of Roman architect Vitruvius. Indeed the Wikipedia article about the famous drawing states that it “was made as a study of the proportions of the (male) human body as described in Vitruvius”, and goes on to describe those perfect proportions.

Obviously, these proportions are meant to represent the ideal human body, and are very rarely actually replicated in the real world. They certainly don’t rep-resent me. The point, however, is not to evaluate the validity of Leonardo’s (and Vitruvius’) theories, but rather to highlight them as a well known example of the theory and concern over proportion in perfection and beauty.

The image of the Vitruviun Man also places an em-phasis on symmetry. Although there are probably few people (if any) in the world who are perfectly symmetrical between their left and right sides, there is a generally held assumption that such balance is ideal, and something to be desired. I’ve seen entire articles and tutorials about retouching photos in or-der to improve the symmetry of a face – reshaping eyes, noses, teeth so that they balance each other properly. There’s also the matter of removing scars, blemishes and other so-called “imperfections” – a word that is very telling in and of itself.

We also see this same concept of balance within the Vitruviun Man’s own proportions. Here are some examples from the Wikipedia article, showing how some these proportions work:

the length of a man’s outspread arms (arm span) is equal to his heightthe distance from the hairline to the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of a man’s heightthe distance from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin is one-eighth of a man’s heightthe distance from the bottom of the neck to the hair-line is one-sixth of a man’s heightIt’s interesting to note that these proportions are based on perfect fractions, thereby breaking the body down over a grid of equally proportioned seg-ments – something that should sound very familiar to most designers.

And, of course, the grid does very much the same thing for a design’s layout that the Vitruvian propor-tions do for the idealized male anatomy. The grid consists of a number of equally spaced and equally sized units, which in turn allows for the elements contained within those units to maintain an identical proportion to each other. At its fundamental core, the grid is a means of enforcing one form of perfection onto a design.

Yet, if this form of perfection is found in repeated, fractional proportions, where every measurement is ultimately a multiplication of a single, common de-nominator, then what do me make of other theoreti-cal concepts like the golden ratio?

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The Golden Ratio

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Phi (Φ) is the term used to represent this golden ratio, which is essentially a proportional relationship that is generally accepted to have a strong visual beauty, and which has a long history as part of the philoso-phy and theory of aesthetics. Turning once again to Wikipedia,

two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to (=) the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one.

Though not really all that complex, that definition might be a little mathematical. What it basically means is that there is an implicit, repeating relation-ship in the size of elements based on a very specific ratio between those elements, rather than on some unalterable and external constant. In other words, it’s arelative proportion rather than an absolute propor-tion, which is what we typically see in a grid.

We also see a difference in its repetition. Whereas a grid is the repetition of a standardized unit (say, 60px over 12 columns, with 20px gutters), the repetition of the golden ratio is not, since each reiteration must be in proportion to the one that precedes it. In this example, we can see the golden ratio used to create a spiral.

Notice how each subsequent segmentation is direct-ly related to the one the precedes it. It is this rela-tionship that makes this particular type of proportion relative rather than absolute.

All that being said, then, how does something like the golden ratio fit into the definition of perfection? Clearly, it doesn’t follow the same sort of structure as the perfection that we see in the Vitruvian Man. In-deed, by those standards, it might almost seem to be imperfect. Yet the intricate mathematical detail that drives the golden ratio certainly seems to suggest that there is something very intentional about the it – something that certainly could not have occured by accident or thoughtless, and which does seem to im-ply a certain innate perfection of its own.

This, of course, brings us firmly into the world of par-adox, and I would like to propose the idea that the golden ratio is one example of what I would call “im-perfect perfection” in design. While it certainly does not fit into the strictly repeating proportions of the traditional grid, it remains an important design con-cept that can be utilized with great success – even within a grid based design (something that I am cur-rently working on).

Ultimately, the point of this article is not to look at the Vitruvian Man, the grid or the golden ratio in great detail. That has been done before. Instead, what I want to highlight is how there exists a fundamental

difference between these two forms, both of which can help us move towards a theoretical perfection (though whether we can ever actually attain it entire-ly is another debate entirely).

I also think that there are some other, similar “imper-fections” that come into play in design – things that may seem to contradict traditional concepts of what is visually perfect, but which can potentially help to improve your designs. Over the coming weeks and months, I plan to continue this series on Imperfect Perfections, and discuss some of the other things that I have discovered through my own reading and experience.

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The Golden Ratio

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A golden rectangle can be constructed with only straightedge and compass by this technique:1. Construct a simple square2. Draw a line from the midpoint of one side of the square to an opposite corner3. Use that line as the radius to draw an arc that defines the height of the rectangle4. Complete the golden rectangle

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The Golden Ratio

GOLDEN RECTANGLE

A golden rectangle is one whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, or approximately 1:1.618.A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle; that is, with the same aspect ra-tio as the first. Square removal can be repeated in-finitely, in which case corresponding corners of the squares form an infinite sequence of points on the golden spiral, the unique logarithmic spiral with this property.According to astrophysicist and math popularizer Mario Livio, since the publication of Luca Pacioli’s Divina Proportione in 1509, when “with Pacioli’s book, the Golden Ratio started to become available to artists in theoretical treatises that were not overly mathematical, that they could actually use,” many artists and architects have been fascinated by the presumption that the golden rectangle is considered aesthetically pleasing. The proportions of the golden rectangle have been observed in works predating Pa-cioli’s publication.

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Φ = LENGTH / WIDTH = 1,618Φ = 297 MM / ? MM = 1,618

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The Golden Ratio

GOLDEN RECTANGLE IN PAPER SIZES

If you want to create a page size according to the golden section, all you have to do is to construct a golden rectangle.First make the dicision what the length will be of your golden rectangle. If you know that, it's very easy to calculate the width if you use 1.61803 as the ratio.Let's take the paper size of this book as an exam-ple. based upon an A4 format, I calculated the width.

We know the length (297mm) and we know the ratio (1.61803). Now it's easy to find the width. All we have to do is divide the length by the ratio. The width is 183,56mm. The size of your golden rectan-gle is 420mm length and 183,56mm width.

<

<

< <183,56 mm

297 mm

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SHAPING THE PAGE

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SHAPING THE PAGEThe Golden Ratio

For this grid, we’re going to use the ratio of the page to define the main text, or content, area of the pages. There’s a very simple way of reducing this page size down to make sure the ratio is correctly placed and balanced. See diagram.

We now have an area, shown in red, in which to construct the grid.

Now you’ve read the other articles you will see that applying the ratio to this area is pretty straight forward. The area is divided using Phi which gives us two columns, A and B.

So, we’ve got the columns, we now need to flesh out the grid to be able to cope with the different content and page types. First off, we extend the lines of the content area and the columns.

We then apply a horizontal rule cutting across content area creation lines. I call these ‘hanging lines’, not too sure what the correct terminology is. But any-way, the content ‘hangs’ from these lines giving us consistency throughout the book. It gives the reader a line, in the same place, to rest their eyes on page after page.

Using the extended lines we can then add areas for the access structure of the book—folios etc. These typically sit outside of the content area, usually with plenty of white space around them, as to show that they are different ‘types’ of content.

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THE GOLDEN SECTION FINDER

The Golden Ratio

I went on investigation with my own made ‘golden section finder’. The finder is made of glass on which I drew the Fibonacci spiral. I took my camera and I made some pictures to make a visual image of what I was doing. It was a perfect experiment to figure out how to make photographs according to the golden section. In my final project, I made a book with photo-graphs according to the golden section to prove that the golden section can be used on every subject.

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final project

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I have designed a book totally according to the Gold-en Section. The size of the three books are golden rectangles. The biggest book is the base golden rec-tangle. The 2nd book (yellow) is the golden rectan-gle of the blue book. And the green little book is the golden rectangle of the jellow book.The page numbers are according to the Febonacci sequence. The first book has 21 pages, the second book had 34 pages and the biggest book has 55 pag-es. The first book is about what the Golden Section is, mathematically. This gives you a mathematical view and can be seen like a sort of manual.The second book is about photography according to the Golden Section. I’ve used two grids to give a fex examples : the rule of thirds and the spiral of Febo-nacci.The biggest and last book is about the Golden Sec-tion in Graphic Design. This book gives examples of several grids, typography, assymetric and symmetric balance, and much more.

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““TYPOGRAPHY NEEDS TO BE AUDIBLE. TYPOGRAPHY NEEDS TO BE FELT. TYPOGRAPHY NEEDS TO BE EXPERIENCED.”- Helmut Schmid

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Experimental Typography

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The assignment is to make a typography in theme of illusion. I am planning to make an alphabet which isn’t readable from a distance, but when you come closer, you’ll notice that the little strokes and arches are part of a letter and together an alphabet. This will create a view of illusion, because from a distance you can’t see what’s really there. You even can’t see it’s an alphabet. The second semester I made my alphabet digital in ‘Fontlab’. I want to make a few posters with the most famous quote of Leonardo Da Vinci.

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When you see this, you can’t read the letters, only if you know that it’s the alphabet. That’s why I brought my experimental font to the next level : I want to increase the stroke contrast. Some parts of the letter will still be visual, but other parts will disappear or will be replaced by a form.

In further research, I began to read Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous quote : “average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.” I’ve already worked with this quote for my illusion assig-ment so I also want to use it for my experimental typography. This causes a greater unity in my work ‘illusion’. During working on these quotes, my typog-raphy evolved into a more complex alphabet. I still want to create the illusion that you can’t read the letters untill you come closer and take a better look at it. I’ve created a poster for each quote in my ex-perimental typography.

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A B C DE F G HI J K L

M N O PQ R S TU V W X

Y Z

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On the right page you can see the alphabet. the intent of the font is to work always with 2 colors depending on your design, background,etc. I’ve started from the design where I only used thick and thin lines. After a while I began to experiment with different colors and fillings.

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A B C D

E F G H

I J K L

M N O P

Q R S T

U V W X

Y Z

A B C D

E F G H

I J K L

M N O P

Q R S T

U V W X

Y Z

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A B C D

E F G H

I J K L

M N O P

Q R S T

U V W X

Y Z

A B C D

E F G H

I J K L

M N O P

Q R S T

U V W X

Y Z

A B C D

E F G H

I J K L

M N O P

Q R S T

U V W X

Y Z

A B C D

E F G H

I J K L

M N O P

Q R S T

U V W X

Y Z

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WE LOOK

WITHOUT

SEEING

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SEEING

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SEEING

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SEEING

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WE LISTEN

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WE TOUCH

W ITHOUT

FEELING

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W ITHOUT

FEELING

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WE TOUCH

W ITHOUT

FEELING

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W ITHOUT

FEELING

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WE EAT

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TASTING

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WE MOVE

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PHYSICAL

AWARENESS

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WE INHALE

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OF OUDOUR OR

FRAGRANCE

WE INHALE

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OF OUDOUR OR

FRAGRANCE

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WE INHALE

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FRAGRANCE

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WE TALK

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