Staging & Layout: Designing for the Screen I


Remember the Golden Section:

"Shapes proportioned according to the golden ratio have long been considered aesthetically pleasing in Western cultures, and the golden ratio is still used frequently in art and design, suggesting a natural balance between symmetry and asymmetry. The ancient Pythagoreans, who defined numbers as expressions of ratios (and not as units as is common today), believed that reality is numerical and that the golden ratio expressed an underlying truth about existence" (Wikipedia.org, 2006).


"The golden ratio was first studied by ancient mathematicians because of its frequent appearance in geometry and may have even been understood and used as far back in history as the Egyptians. It is also believed that after tracing the path of Venus in the sky, they found that the ratio of the length of the long arm of the pentagon shape to the length of the shorter arm was 1.618 ... ... More commonly, however, the discovery of the golden ratio is ascribed to the ancient Greeks, and is usually attributed to Pythagoras (or to the Pythagoreans, notably Theodorus) or to Hippasus of Metapontum. Euclid spoke of the "golden mean" this way, "A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser". The golden ratio is represented by the Greek letter (phi, after Phidias, a sculptor who commonly employed it) or less commonly by ? (tau)" (Wikipedia.org, 2006).




The Golden Spiral: The length of the side of a larger square to the next smaller square is in the
golden ratio (Wikipedia.org, 2006).