Nature’s Math Behind it’s Beauty
While I was working at Informa my team and I came up with a system to fast track high volumes of graphic design work. We were really proud of what we’d done because we ended up saving the business a lot of money by implementing this system (like in the hundreds of thousands of dollars which was a great success for our small team). And what’s more is the business never directly asked us to do this. As we industrialized our processes and made them available to a 14,000 employee business I kept looking at more and more in-depth ways to streamline this design process. And as a result I came across (once again) a centuries old formula for maintaining proportion in aesthetic placement. This formula is taught to almost anyone who has had entry level art history in any art school. It’s the golden ratio. This ratio can be used to create grids that achieve proper aesthetic proportions in a whole variety of ways.
One of the famous grid formations built from this ratio is the Fibonacci Spiral. It’s a famously used framework and it is found occurring in nature over and over again. The proportions that make up this spiral are the same whether it’s a sea shell, the Milky Way Galaxy or the flush of a toilet (even Donald Trump’s hair!!).
I began thinking about how we could use the sequence of numbers in today’s contexts to have graphic design mimic nature. And when I was thinking about the “mimicking” piece I was specifically thinking about rapidly occurring output on its own. I’m not going to get into all of that on today’s blog but you can either send me a note or check out my personal website if you’d like to hear more.
What I do want to ponder a bit here is just how truly remarkable this ratio is. You see, I not only went to art school but I’ve played the piano for decades as well and I’ve always been struck by the fact that the sequence of numbers that make up this ratio (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc) not only exists in visuals like classical paintings but in all of the musical instruments created by western civilization in the past bunch of centuries (prior to that the Greeks and even the Egyptians are credited with developing science and art using these numbers). It creates a very sound argument that there is indeed a structure to things (at least partially) and that things in nature just kind of “follow the rules” to the structure naturally without having to be “taught” anything.
The result is a kind of “resonance” we have with an invisible structure that is repeatedly mapped out by this sequence of numbers… You know… invisibly (trippy, right?). Just like there are musical harmonies and rhythms, there are aesthetic harmonies and rhythms. Whether you’re struck by DaVinci’s Mona Lisa or Lady Gaga’s latest Grammy award winner, these numbers have not only played a part but have provided the very structure onto which these two artists have placed their very unique expressions. Once more, I’d argue that its not just these two artists who’ve done this but all artists (this can definitely be debated but I thought I’d boldly state it anyway).
Doesn’t this just blow your mind? I mean it’s really kind of mind blowing. As “different” and as “brilliant” as Lady Gaga is, she’s also tremendous student of music. And that means she’s extensively familiarized herself with these invisible structures in the form of chord creations in her music. Every note she plays, every combination of tones, chords and harmonies can be immediately and directly mapped back to this miraculous pattern of numbers.
I remember presenting these concepts at my last job and the head of operations called out, “See! Everything comes back to math!!!” To which I replied, “The thing is, this ratio existed billions and billions of years before math ever did. Human beings merely observed this phenomenon and, being the ingenious creatures that we are, we invented math to correlate with it. Not the other way around. I’d argue that these patterns are more what math itself is “coming back to”.”
mind blown.