The Surprising Simplicity of Ratios In Effective Design

Sources / Additional Reading The Rules of Everything (Pt. 1) - How Simple Ratios Dictate Your Preferences The Rules of Everything (Pt. 2) - How Society Sets Your Preferences

Key Takeaways

  • SIMPLE RATIOS: Dominate most of our preferences in color, form, layout, & music.
  • ASK WHY: The root cause of why something is happening is usually most important.
  • STAY OBJECTIVE: Try to avoid doing things because they “look cool.” Have a reason.
  • EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED: You can’t design in a vacuum. Previous design and societal cues drive most decisions.

Lecture Outline

  • Most design thinking needs to take place “Inside The Box”, not “Outside The Box”
  • What the box is just varies
  • All design carries tons of visual baggage with it from hundreds of years of previous designs
  • What we like in the creative realms is quantifiable
  • Premise 1: Sound = Color
  • Isaac Newton - Opticks: A treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light
  • Light and Sound can be compared via wavelength
  • Premise 2: Our Brains Crave Simple Patterns
  • Lack of input and Too Much input impede the brain
  • Pareidolia & Latent Inhibition are how your brains copes with the overwhelming amount of info
  • In music, simple time signatures and repetition are what we prefer
  • 3/4 = Waltz
  • 4/4 = Most popular music
  • 5/4 = Halloween Theme
  • The band Tool frequently uses strange time signatures
  • Premise 3: Polyrhythms are Everything
  • A polyrhythm is when two different rhythms going on at the same time eventually line up to become a single rhythm.
  • 2/3 Feels Good
  • 8/15 Feels Bad
  • Polyrhythms = Polypitch
  • Chordal relationships can be expressed as Polyrhythms
  • 4:5:6 = Major Chord
  • Premise 4: Common Polyrhythms are Superparticular
  • 4:5:6 in Light is Primary Colors
  • 4:5:6:7 in Light is Secondary Colors
  • Humans tend to discover and invent colors in this order as well
  • CD/DVD = Red laser
  • Blu-ray = Blue laser
  • 3:2 in color = Orange vs. Blue. Common movie poster
  • 4:3 in form = Nike Logo
  • 2:3 in Logo = Mastercard
  • Most Successful things contain Superparticular ratios
  • Rule of Thirds
  • Amino Acids, the building blocks
  • Most common elements in the Universe: Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon
  • Conclusion: That which feels good can be quantified. Simple superparticular ratios
  • What does this matter?
  • Design is an emergent property of smaller decisions
  • Simply picking good Line, Color, Shape, Texture, and Scale don’t produce good design, they produce visually coherent items
  • Visually Coherent ≠ Good Design
  • Design decisions can’t be made in a vacuum. You need to involve everything else that’s ever happened
  • Simple Ratios, Expectations, and Societal Cues usually have a bigger influence on Good Design
  • When someone says “something feels off” about a design, it’s usually one of those 3 things.
  • Good design is Descriptive, not Prescriptive
  • What DID happen, not what SHOULD happen
  • Observational instead of Suggestive
  • This is why all soda logos feel the same, and all Cereal logos with few exceptions have dozes of strokes and drop shadows
  • The Universe seems to require these simple ratios to organize information.