The Golden Section will add the ahhhhh! to your layouts and once you master it people will look at your work and think you are a rocket scientist in design. It is also fascinating and mysterious as phi is a powerful aesthetic tool that can evoke great emotion in your audience.
I found a link that shows how to golden section a square so check it out:
http://textism.com/bucket/fibsquare.html
Once you have created golden section grid lines you can use the intersections of those lines to position images and text for your portfolio spreads. It really is amazing how applying the golden section to your page designs pushes them to a higher visual aesthetic.
If you want to learn more check out these links:
http://milan.milanovic.org/math/english/golden/golden1.html
http://milan.milanovic.org/math/english/golden/golden5.html
http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibInArt.html
http://powerretouche.com/Divine_proportion_tutorial.htm
http://www.layersmagazine.com/illustrator-design-goldensection.html
One of our class textbooks on the subject is called The Geometry of Design: Studies in proportion and composition by Kimberly Elam. It is inexpensive and has many great examples with tracing tissue overlays showing golden sections.
What do the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the sun pyramid of Teotihuacan have in common? What secret did great world thinkers, artists and composers like Plato, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Beethoven and Bach embrace?
In this short video Sean Bacon does a masterful job of explaining the golden section. The results are amazing and you will be hooked on the power of the design tool. The relationship between mathematical thinking and design is fascinating. Sean and I will be working with you this semester to perfect your golden section layouts, push your typography and make those portfolio spreads really sing.
"The power of the golden section to create harmony arises from its unique capacity to unite different parts of a whole so that each preserves its own identy, and yet blends into the greater pattern of a single whole". Gyorgy Doczi, The Power of Limits 1994
