'Leonardo da Vinci' - Frank Zöllner

Zöllner's 'The Complete Paintings and Drawings', published by Taschen, is one of my favourite books. In fact, it's two books – one for paintings, and one for drawings – and a complete collection of everything that survives from Leonardo's work. There are apparently still lots of codices that are missing, unless they've already been destroyed.

As it's a full collection, everything from the scrappy doodles to the finished paintings is included. Modern exhibitions of his work lead us to believe he was a portrait artist who achieved nothing but perfection. So, it's amazing to see some of the more amateur drawings he produced (which we never find on display) and to notice that so many of his drawings were actually mechanical schematics which were the result of his working for Cesare Borgia and other military leaders.

The only downfall to the books is that they're presented inside a cardboard casing that isn't the best quality. If you look closely at the first image, you can see the vertical lines in the cover – the cardboard texture showing through. Not the best design decision given the price of this otherwise brilliant book.

The Lives of Others & Stasiland

The Lives of Others is a 2006 German-language film about East Berlin during the 80s. It follows a playwright and an actress whose apartment is placed under full surveillance by the Stasi (the then Ministry for State Security). You get a real sense of their rigid and obsessive methods for gathering information about their own people, and Ulrich Mühe does an amazing job in portraying the main Stasi operative. I'd never seen Mühe in anything before, but after watching this, it was no surprise to read how popular he was as an actor – and that he'd had first-hand experience of the Stasi earlier in his life. I couldn't believe it when I read that he had passed away in 2007.

Although there is hardly any graphic design featured in the film, there are plenty of examples of severe minimalism and neutrality - be it in the architecture, the way people speak, the suppression of emotion, the order and discipline. All this makes me think of a visual graphic equivalent, like Jan Tschichold's early work – which he is said to have later described as being akin to fascism because of it's overly strict approach. It isn't something I've considered before – is it realistic to suggest that the obsessive nature of a designer could spill over into society and wreak havoc?

I was interested in learning more about the Stasi and the Berlin Wall, so I got a copy of Stasiland by Anna Funder. The edition featured here is really well designed – only two colours throughout. It is described as a collection of accounts by both victims and members of the Stasi, so I was expecting quite a linear chapter-by-chapter structure but actually the author blends all of the accounts into one long narrative with herself at the centre – as she goes along meeting new people in Berlin. It was interesting to see how many things from the book carried over into The Lives of Others, or vice versa, e.g. how the odd Stasi member might joke about their superiors and the sudden effects that doing so might have on their career.

YouTube, of course, has loads of videos about the Berlin Wall and the prison in East Berlin, and the links will take you to a couple that I recommend. In this video, you'll meet one of the people from Anna Funder's book – her story is totally heartbreaking.

Out of interest, I had a look on Eye Magazine and came across this article and this article, both of which offer a small insight into the design world of the GDR.

The history of the GDR has made me consider the effects of being overly scientific in anything I do – not only design – and that designers must be aware of the world around them, whether they 'like' politics or not. Maybe history shows us that imposing strict order is only healthy for as long as you can indulge in a little chaos along the way.

'Graphic Design Theory' - Helen Armstrong

This book is a great record of many of the theories put forward by graphic designers since the early 1900s. It weighs in at 150 pages and features just enough full colour images to avoid monotony.

The design is handled cleverly, given the nature of the content. Quotations run up the left side of the asymmetrical page layouts, probably to allow for a comfortable line length and text size. Mini biographies are set in a cedar brown and, interestingly, the body copy doesn't use a sans-serif. The passage by Herbert Bayer is set without any use of capitals, as a nod to his practice of never using them, but again a serif font is used (not that I'm complaining). Each new section is heralded by a double-page: the left being a full-bleed image, and the right, an introduction on a solid colour background. Also, the inside cover pages (see last image) show an abstract illustration of an eye built up by various symbols, including a representation of Phi, to visualize the book's title – understated but beautiful.

The actual content of the book is, as mentioned, a collection of writings by different designers. Something about the more scientific movements, up to 1940, really resonates with me – work by Jan Tschichold and Josef Muller-Brockmann just seems so timeless. It's the scientific approach that they, and others before them, took to design that appeals to me. The justification of every single design decision – I guess it's what caused one modern-day agency to call itself Why Not Associates, presumably in revolt of that practice (it doesn't say on their website, but I noticed they don't use capitals in the text either).

One thing I did notice about some of the writings from modern designers is the irony that, while they make a living out of visual communication, their written communication is dire. It actually seems to be a past-time for many people in the design world to write bull***t like 'cryptic, poker-faced juxtapositions' when they're trying to make a point. Perhaps they just enjoy writing with an airy-fairy pomposity (as I do, evidently), and have no real desire to persuade their audience of anything. Personally, I was always taught that, even if your vocabulary meets the standard of that of Will Self, if you can't/won't say something in plain language, it's usually not worth saying.

Still, the irritating authors featured within the book shouldn't reflect on the design of the book, which is superb for the reasons I mentioned. I guess it has a bitter-sweet nature for me – bitter in that it gives voice to people whose favourite book is a thesaurus, and sweet because it celebrates some amazing designers from the early half of the 20th century, among others.

The Form Book

Borries Schwesinger produced this superb book about form design.

The subject of the book was also the focus of Borries' dissertation earlier on in his career. He built upon his dissertation with more written and visual content in order to produce what I think is the only book worth reading if you want to learn more about forms. He talks about their history, design, and use. It's not common that people write about how designs are actually used by the general public but in this book it was unavoidable. So it's interesting to read what he says about how people use forms.

The book has a striking cover design. It's a pattern of alternating green diagonal lines with some low-key typography overlaid. He uses a thin stock for some of the first few pages that feature full-bleed images. Definitely something an all-round designer should consider adding to their book shelf.

Common Interest

Emmi Salonen has designed a book that documents the work of a variety of studios around Europe.

It's printed on an uncoated stock and has an unusual cover design as you can see in the photos below. The first few pages describe forms of paper folding and the main body of the book is made up of spreads, one per project, with a simple overview of the printing specifications on the left pages. No detailed written content to be found here but nonetheless it's a nice collection of images for inspiration.

The typography and layout is quite refreshingly different and there's a nice combination of different paper stocks used inside.

Advertising for graphic designers

Any graduate of graphic design may find very early in their career that they're asked to produce adverts (both write and design them) and, even though their degree course may have said nothing about advertising, it'll be their choice to sink or swim.

I don't think it matters how little the client is paying for the advert – most designers would surely want to make the best of it that they can (within reason). So the following books are hopefully good starting points for designers who want to learn about advertising/writing – and I've found them really useful myself.

1. The Advertising Concept Book
This is a superb book which is as impressive in its design as it is in content. Every example advert (there is at least one per page) has been re-drawn in pencil – demonstrating one of the main points in the book . . that every idea starts with a pencil and paper.

2. Advertising Now! Print
Full of really creative adverts – this one will be useful to have open while you're reading the book above. Plus, there's an article inside it that I've included below – it's a really clever piece of writing that includes some good information about copywriting.

3. Writing that works
Although not directly linked to advertising, this book will definitely give you something to think about. One simple and seemingly obvious point from the book is: people don't care what you have to say about yourself, but they'll listen if you talk about them.

The Redstone Shop

If you're scratching your head over xmas gifts (hopefully not literally) you might try Redstone Press, for all your totally-random-but-beautiful book needs.

http://www.theredstoneshop.com/

Here's a diary I bought from them - it's like when you're a kid and you get something for xmas that you never touch in case you break/damage it. I never wrote inside this! Much too precious.

Hermetica

This is a very interesting read if you haven't already. It's just another set of opinions about the world, doubtlessly contributing to the ongoing battle among believers, non-believers and . . misc.

It was a big deal during the Renaissance – Ficino was even told to put his translation of Plato on hold in order to translate Hermes Trismegistus's writings for Cosimo de Medici. The book pictured is a very condensed version of the original writings – which spanned many books, one of which, I think I read, is lost.

Whether you agree with it or not is, of course, not the point. I personally question a lot of it, but at least it gets us asking questions. At one point it mentions 'seeing with your mind' – that's an idea that could keep you thinking for a while.

The Montefeltro Conspiracy - Marcello Simonetta

For anyone interested in Renaissance Italy, add this beauty to your bookshelf - The Montefeltro Consiracy.

I'd read quite a lot about Renaissance Florence before I came across Federico da Montefeltro - it was actually a portrait by Pedro Berrugete that I saw of him (first image below) that caught my eye (...a pun for later). I'd seen Piero della Francesca's painting (second image below) long ago and knew very little about it. I assumed it was of some Italian scholar or another, never knowing he was actually a battle-hardened condottiere. Seeing Berruguete's portrait, I'd managed to make the link back to della Francesca's work and saw it in a totally new light. For instance, if the man's face was depicted from the other side, we would find him missing an eye - the result of a jousting accident and the reason why the bridge of his nose is almost horizontal (a little DIY to his face improved his vision with that lonely left eye).

The book itself is a beautiful one - embossed lettering on the cover and the inner pages left untrimmed. The literature surrounds the assassination attempt upon Lorenzo 'Il Magnifico' de Medici; it includes lots of images that I've seen in no other books on the subject and, although they're in black and white to conform to the book's design, they really offer a valuable resource on a quite specialised subject.

Proportion: Richard Padovan

Proportion: Richard Padovan — Part 1

I've been trying to get through this book so that I could put up a single post about it but it's 370 pages of detailed information that I think will warrant at least five posts! As I'm almost half way through, I thought I'd mention a few points that Padovan, the writer, has made thus far. Padovan, incidentally, was/is a lecturer at Bath University only a few miles from Bath Arts Uni campus that I attended (so I'm a bit annoyed I didn't find this book then).

The book is, as I say, packed full of really insightful points made by the author and those architects/mathematicians etc he quotes. The following will resemble a bullet point list, unfortunately, until I get my head around it a little more. I can see a mass network of interlinking bits of information coming together from what I read about proportion; architecture; modern researchers like Hambidge, Wittkower and Ghyka; Renaissance architects and painters like Leon Battista Alberti, Vasari, Brunelleschi; the Florentine writers – Ficino, Mirandola, Poliziano; right through to Plato, Plotinus and so on; and then there are all of the lesser related, but significant, subjects like 15th century Poland, the Hungarian Empire, Renaissance Milan and the Academies, Alois Reigl and Nietzsche (whom I also found while writing my dissertation on the Vienna Secession). I began to learn about proportion as an aid to my design work, but I've found more and more than it is intrinsically linked to my other interest – Renaissance Florence/Italy.

Early on in the book Padovan brings up the question of whether proportional systems are to be applied first, as a sort of code of conduct, or last, as a corrective device to improve what has been done up to then. Either way, there are questions to be asked about the process. For instance, can proportional awareness create a monotonous feeling in works? Can it void all sense of talent if used well? What do we mean by talent? Is talent necessary/important? Gustav Fechner proved that the majority of people he chose preferred, out of a large group of rectangles (and a square – being a 1:1 rectangle), the one whose sides followed the Golden Proportions 1:618. Others chose either a rectangle very similar to the Golden Rectangle or the square. What, then, does talent mean with regard to proportion?

Padovan goes on to consider Le Corbusier's/Alberti's idea of the relevance of proportion (in architecture) where the eye cannot see it (in graphic design, this may be a proportional system working very obscurely, in some way). Considering we cannot see, and do not yet understand, all of the universe, we are to assume it is all based on some binding mathematical principal. So their argument is to continue what we assume occurs in the universe by applying an overall principal of proportion to whatever we put into the universe. What is the point of proportion where we can't readily see it? The book says 'the eye of God' but I have a problem with that, if it means the common religious God. Were it to mean the eye of Ficino's idea of the soul, I could agree. In simpler terms, we (I hope) wouldn't feel comfortable tidying a house by taking everything that was out of place and throwing it into a cupboard somewhere. That messy cupboard might rest on our thoughts and give us a guilty feeling. Someone might open it and your reputation as a good housekeeper may collapse! I think this is what is meant in the book by 'the eye of God'. At least, that's how I'd argue for the need to tie every part of a design into its proportional context.

Proportion: Richard Padovan — Part 2

An interesting point made by Hans Van Der Laan: 'The space of nature has three aspects that leave us at a loss…. The sheer fact that we refer to natural space using negative terms like 'immeasurable', 'invisible', and 'boundless' indicates that it lacks something for us. We do not feel altogether in our element within it. Architecture, then, is nothing else but that which must be added to natural space to make it habitable, visible and measurable.'  Something to consider, but I couldn't disagree more with his conclusion. Why do so many people like to 'retreat to the countryside'? I've heard many more people use the word 'beautiful' to describe most parts of nature. If it were beautiful we're saying we need add nothing to it but that which sustains us. Furthermore, it is of nature that we build in the first place. Also, how often do we hear people around the Eiffel Tower saying 'wow', 'incredible', or the French 'incroyable'! (Fun to say). These terms may begin with the prefix 'in' but are not negative – we are praising it and saying how it cannot be believed/measured/understood. And yet, in a previous post, I have already shown the Effiel Tower to be measurable by Phi.

This is why it is so useful to stop ourselves from using interjections like 'wow' and run-of-the-mill adjectives like 'amazing' or 'fantastic' when we see something we like. Next time you see something you 'like', stop and think about it. What caught your eye? The colour? Size? Shape? Message? Idea? Then ask yourself why. It must relate to other things (like objects, or your experiences): what are these things and how does it relate? Answer all these questions honestly and you may find yourself understanding that which, at first, was an allusion to you. I suppose it's similar to how some people fall in love, thinking so highly of one another, only to end up sick of each other a few decades later, after they each know/understand their partner as best they can.

I can't remember why but Van Der Laan's comment made me think about the saying 'it's not what you do but how you do it'. In learning about proportion, it's very easy to start believing this saying, as it relates to Padovan's early comment on whether proportion systems negate talent. If 'how' were all that mattered, 'talent' could be meaningless. Some Renaissance artists have said that the Golden Proportion is not the conclusion of art, but the beginning. It is, according to them, not as simple as creating a pleasing composition. I'm sure the typographer, Jan Tschichold, would agree. Meaning affects composition, and vice versa. If 'how' were all that mattered, does it mean that the work of Dante Alighieri, who was well received because he wrote in Italian with masterful ability (rather that the less practical Latin), loses some of its original merit when translated?

Van Der Laan is again quoted: 'Breathing begins at birth with an inspiration and ends at death with an expiration; so too when we make something we must conceive the influence of forms upon our mind as the initial life-giving movement'. Padovan explains that this is a description of how we operate when building/making. I read it as meaning that whatever we can build or create will be a model of what we have taken in from the world and put together in our mind. This forms one side, anyway, of the narrative that runs through Padovan's book; the tussle between 'empathy' and 'abstraction'. 'Empathy' is the argument that knowing is belonging – what we do we take from nature. What we put into nature is already found there in another form. There are limits that come with the empathetic stance; we are only as advanced as nature allows us to be. 'Abstraction' is the opposite extreme whereby human beings have the ability to operate independently of nature and our architecture etc is imposed upon it; for example, the square, accord to supporters of 'abstraction' is not found in nature. I think there may be another question to it; does nature not include the human mind? Where does nature end and living organisms begin? Surely the human mind and its capabilities are part of nature. A square, then, is conceivable, and part of nature. After all, nature does not end with what we see. 

I recently read something written by Marsilio Ficino, a Florentine during the Renaissance, that may add to this: 'Do you desire to look on the face of good [not God]? Then look around at the whole universe, full of the light of the sun. Look at the light in the material world, full of all forms in constant movement; take away the matter, leave the rest. You have the soul, an incorporeal light that takes all shapes and is full of change. Once again, take from this the changeability, and now you have reached the intelligence of the angels, the incorporeal light, taking all shapes but unchanging. Take away from this that diversity by which any form differs from the light, and which is infused into the light from elsewhere, and then the essence of the light and of each form is the same; the light gives form to itself and through its own forms gives forms to everything.'

A further point that Pandovan touches on, and the final one I'll mention here, is the need to combine unity and complexity to create 'true order', where 'unity' is a constant and 'complexity' is an unexpected outcome. For instance, to work with irrational numbers like 1.618 is to give 'complexity' to the 'unity' of the number 1. Combining a rational number like 2 with the 'unity' in 1 is not a method of true order. Jay Hambidge puts the two outcomes down to 'static' and 'dynamic' symmetry; irrational numbers will create unexpected outcomes in proportion systems, like Phi, and are therefore the creators of a 'dynamic' symmetry. Rudolph Wittkower, similarly, puts the two distinct methods down as the 'geometrical' and 'arithmetical'. This idea of unity with complexity can be found in other formats though; even just to look at the decorative elements in Renaissance armour, as shown in a previous post, we find 'unity' in the fact that the illustration sits upon a central mirror axis and 'complexity' in the actual content of the illustration.

I did read about Van Der Laan's recording of the 'plastic number' and have found that I came across it myself by accident in a previous post. I didn't know it was so significant at the time but I'll have to repeat the post and add into it what I've read in Padovan's book. So, more to come on this, for sure.

Josef Albers: Interaction of Color

I got half way through this book today, which, before now, would sit on my desk staring at me while I got other loose ends tied away. Great book – shame about the spelling of ‘colour’. It’s about more than just the colour illusions we’ve all seen before – understanding them, and reacting with that knowledge, will make for even more measured and reasoned design.

I liked his following opinion of colour-handling…though it is questionable in some ways: ‘good colouring is comparable to good cooking. Even a good cooking recipe demands tasting and repeated tasting while it is being followed. And the best tasting still depends on a cook with taste.’ It’s definitely true that colour should be revisited/manually controlled – as the following examples will prove. Consistency in colour values, for instance, does not always equal consistency in colour to the eye (in other words, the same colour can appear different due to a variety of reasons, like light). In many circumstances, if the creator wants, say, two pieces of type to appear the same colour visually, it may be necessary to make them slightly different colours (if, say, their backgrounds are of different colours).

Here are a few interesting examples of colour interaction I’ve read about so far:

In the second image below (click on it for a proper view), there is a black rectangle with a grey centre square, and a white rectangle with a grey centre square. This is an example of making two different colours appear the same. The grey squares are repeated below the image, side-by-side. See the difference?

Similarly, (and excuse the imperfection of this one, as it was my own attempt and not a copy from the book), in the third image we see a bright pink rectangle and pale purple rectangle, each with an orange centre square. The orange appears the same colour in each if you gaze at the centre of the image. For clarity, the orange squares are repeated below, and the difference is again clear.

Then there is the ability of colours to make one colour look like two. The last pair of images demonstrate this – two rectangles, one purple, the other brown, appear to have centre squares whose hue equals that of the opposite large rectangle. Brown with purple square, purple with brown square. In reality, though, the small squares are the same colour, as repeated underneath the image.

The main point behind all this is that influencing colours (dominating colours/colours with the largest area or presence) will SUBTRACT their own hue from those colours that they influence. Put a certain green shape inside a large yellow area, for instance, and that green will lose some of the yellow to its appearance…thus becoming more blue. Or, simply, a black background makes a colour lighter (it loses its darkness) as a white makes colour darker.

So?? Well, for typographers, this lesson should be an important one. If the colour of your type always needs to be the same colour in a particular publication, it is only the visual level of colour that matters to the audience – so you should put trust in your own eyes and adjust the type colour ever so slightly to allow for backgrounds of strong colour-influence. As Albers  would say, stop cooking and have a taste now and then.

Ways of Seeing, John Berger

This is a great little book for a number of reasons. I like short reads – books I can finish the same day I begin them. The design of this book is excellent – Richard Hollis originally designed it and the version below is a re-design by YES. One very interesting feature of this book is the cover design – the main text begins on the cover and continues on the first recto page. Its readability is also very strong; its use of a medium/bold type style with good line spacing and a lightweight style for key words makes a lot of sense. The actual content of the book is engaging too, of course. Two/three chapters are solely made up of images to encourage the reader to extract an argument from their coupling, juxtaposition, ordering and selection.

Book: ‘The Divine Proportion: A Study in Mathematical Beauty’ by H.E. Huntley

I got this book the other day – along with a few other £5 gems on Amazon – and found it a really good buy. I posted Ghyka’s book, The Geometry of Art and Life, before and, although it was a good collection of examples of where the golden section comes into play, I still wanted to actually learn more about Phi.

This book was ideal for getting a better understanding of the numbers themselves and how everything works together. It was written in the ‘70s and there is quite an amusing passage where the author discusses a computer, which he needed permission to use, that could give him the answer to an enormous calculation he was making. If only he knew how much easier it would become in a decade or two. Still, one of the points he makes in the book is that there is still much to be uncovered about the ‘beauty of maths’ and, with the constant evolution of technology, this is no doubt true today.

The book covers the golden section/divine proportion/Phi in a vast array of drawings and calculations. Some of the mathematics is a little advanced for a modest GCSE-level pleb like myself, and Huntley happily points that out in his book, but with his equations in front of you, it isn’t difficult to learn the necessary parts of algebra involved.

I love the way Huntley writes the book – it’s seriously in-depth and yet light-hearted and personal. He makes a great attempt at rationalizing the idea of beauty and why Phi is the most pleasing formula to the human eye. Is it that you learn to love home, and home happens to be the world in which Phi plays so big a role? Or is it subjective?

Huntley makes the point that beauty may indeed be in the eye of the beholder but there are two levels to our perception of beauty. One is inborn in us all – that sense of ‘judging the book by its cover’. Then there is ‘acquired’ understanding of beauty which means that we find beauty through education – I can vouch for this in some ways: I remember an art history lesson involving a painting of Napoleon. I saw the quite plain-looking painting and got quite bored with it until my teacher pointed out the humour behind the image – the artist had an agenda – propoganda – and had therefore added a quite large shadow to the figure’s crotch, basically indicating he was well-hung as if to say ‘he’s the daddy’! Being a dippy teenager, I found this hilarious and have remembered that piece of information ever since. So, because I know that little fact, I feel more attached to the painting – even more so than, say, the Eiffel Tower because even though the latter is more immediately beautiful, I have the ‘acquired knowledge’ in Napoleon’s portrait and it works as added beauty.

Huntley talks about poetry and music and relates the two to the golden section – apparently in music there are time intervals which interact with the body’s internal clock in such a way that we find them the most pleasing of all. This interval happens to be in direct relation to Phi, telling us that the golden section has a claim to us humans more intrinsic than that which was illustrated by Renaissance artists with the human body, namely a connection to the soul itself.

Huntley quotes Francis Thompson to make a point for those who put little value in the matters that he discusses in the book (for lack of education or knowledge, as he argues):

The angels keep their ancient places;
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangéd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

Grid Systems/Raster systeme by Müller-Brockmann

I’m currently working through the book below, which I bought recently after it finally became in-stock on Amazon, and have to say it’s one of the best I’ve ever read on layout and typesetting. Readers may already be aware of most of what’s in it but it’s really handy to get something that keeps everything in one place. It’s a beautiful book too. If anyone is interested, it‘s on Amazon but you’ll have to be quick (it’s quite highly sought after), and don’t worry that it says it’s German – it has an English translation running beside the German right through. Fantastisch!

Also: I would steer clear of the ironically named Layout Book by Ambrose and Harris if you’re after something that actually teaches anything in detail about layout. It’s worth getting to adorn your bookcase but only for its varied examples of design work and its basic intro to all things typographic (like the golden section, typefaces and book page rhythms).

Geometry of Art and Life

I’ve been reading/studying this book lately to get a better understanding of the mind-boggling nature of the golden section, root 2/3/4/5 etc rectangles and any related topics. I recommend it but would also say that a book on general geometry would be handy too. In fact, for designers, Geometry of Design by K. Elam is a great introduction and includes a number of good case-study pages where specific (and popular) examples are explained. Work of J Tschichold features.

Back to the book in question; there is quite an interesting quote from Plato’s Philebus that the author, Ghyka, puts down as a cubist manifesto: ‘By beauty of shape I want you here to understand not what the multitude generally means by this expression, like the beauty of living beings or of paintings representing them, but something alternatively rectilinear and circular [geometry], and the surfaces and solids which one can produce from the rectilinear and the circular, with compass, set-square and rule. Because these things are not, like the others, conditionally beautiful, but are beautiful in themselves.’ In other words then, the audience of a piece of art/design will see the geometry in its development but call the object, itself, beautiful. (Perhaps this explains the questionable fashion of fifties furnishings for their time: as long as the geometry works, can the designs be ugly?) I guess Ghyka puts it down as a cubist statement as he assumes Plato would find it more worthwhile for artists to employ the geometric shapes more directly, like Braque, for instance, has. Still, there’s a place for humanists and a place for cubists.

I’m slowly getting more and more use out of this book – in typography, layout and composition to name a few. As far as stifling creativity goes…I think many great paintings tell us that content and proportion need not be one and the same. Mixing the two in a skillful way is the real challenge though.

P.S. Try this if you’re really bored (as, admittedly, you may be after reading this post): Measure (a) your full standing height and then (b) from the floor to your navel. If you divide ‘a’ by ‘b’ and get roughly 1.618 then congrats – according to Ghyka you have ideal golden section body proportions.  Similarly, it is a pleasing bodily proportion if the length between your finger tips (when standing, arms stretched horizontally to the sides) is equal to your height (in other words, if you met all four edges of a square, were you to stand inside one with arms outstretched). Send any complaints to L. Da Vinci, Florence; no responses guaranteed.