Lesson 2 on my Open University course Design and the Web comprises mostly of theory on web design. This included design rules like download times, colour palettes, visual disabilities, type size, fonts, readability. The list goes on and includes a section on ratios, which quickly turned into a maths lesson. Oh bugger – maths. I haven’t done any real maths since school. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who found this part of the course an effort to remember and on the OU forum many people said that had to read it couple of times to take it all in. Back to maths and especially golden ratios. The golden ratio is 1.6 to 1. Here is what wikipedia says about it:
“In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is approximately 1.6180339887.“
To me this is blah, blah, blah but according to my course it is do with proportion and balance. Sorry but I feel this post is getting boring so I decided to quickly created a rectangle with nice looking curves using the golden ratio method. Now it might not be exactly 1.6:1 as it only took me 10 mins to create but I used the idea – golden-ratio1. Lesson 3 looks more exciting as I will be actually creating web pages. I had forgotten how dull maths can be – sorry Maths teachers everywhere!
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