By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, October 08, 2007 - 5:40:00

We all know about the divine proportion, right? It is the ratio based on the irrational number 1.61803. It’s called “Phi” in mathematics, and it is believed to be the most natural ratio, in a sense that many things around us can be expressed in this proportion. As nature was once regarded as created by God, so was the golden ratio, or Divine Proportion.

Whether God is behind all this, is a great unknown, but what I do know is that a design that applies the divine proportion to good measure, looks good and natural and makes the eye rest. Such a design will feel comfortable, and therefore is extremely well suited for graphic and packaging design. The only problem is: how do you apply it?

I’m focussing on graphic design here, so paper size is the first aspect we have to deal with. A European A4 isn’t exactly divinely proportioned, but even then you can create a design that looks quite balanced by applying the ratio. In the Adobe Illustrator example, I measured the tallest side of the paper (297 mm) and divided it by 1.61803. The resulting smallest rectangle’s longest side was once more divided by that same number.

I think you’ll agree with me that the proportions of the rectangles look right. For comparison’s sake, I did the same for a Letter page, and if you compare that with the A4, the A4 looks better. A check with my favourite designer tool, xScope, revealed that the Letter page does not support the Golden Ratio that well.

To have a perfect divine proportion design, though, you’ll have to create your own page size.

In Illustrator, you can design a brochure easily, but what should you do if you’re using QuarkXPress or InDesign? In that case, you can design page layout based on the divine proportion by using guides and grids. The most basic grid would be one that evenly spaces guides at 16.1803 units (mm, pts, whatever) both horizontally and vertically.

This requires a bit of work, especially in InDesign, where you can’t save guides and grids for re-use, if I’m not mistaken.

For QuarkXPress 7, you can download the XPert Tools Pro XTensions set. If you haven’t done so already, I would strongly suggest you do. The Tools are free, and they come with a great addition in terms of guides and girds: XPert Guides. After installation of the XPert Tools into QuarkXPress 7’s XTensions folder, you will have access to an XPert Guides palette. This palette will save you time by offering the capability to save complete sets of guides and grids after initial setup.

When you have carefully created your guides --you can find a saved set for A4 paper for you to download-- you can then create a divine proportioned page layout, based on these guides. If you make your bottom margin somewhat bigger than your upper margin, you’ll create what in medieval times was known as incunabula, and which is a set of pleasing and functional margins of 1/9 and 2/9 of the page size.

The resulting inside margin is one-half of the outside margin, and of proportions 2:3:4:6 (inner:top:outer:bottom) when the page proportion is 2:3 (more generally 1:R:2:2R for page proportion 1:R).