[HN Gopher] The Golden Ratio and User-Interface Design
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The Golden Ratio and User-Interface Design
Author : adrian_mrd
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-11-01 14:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nngroup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nngroup.com)
| karaterobot wrote:
| If you think using the golden ratio will solve actual problems
| for you, you're wrong. In general, the design of a screen layout
| should come from the type and amount of content you need for
| users to perform a task, not from an arbitrary number. This stuff
| smells like magical thinking to me.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Golden ratio is not arbitrary, it solves the problem: How to
| make sure nothing lines up.
|
| This link gets passed around a lot and it's very illuminating,
| demonstrating that the golden ratio is objectively "the most
| irrational number": https://youtu.be/sj8Sg8qnjOg
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa: The length and width of the head
| (segments a1 and b1), as well as the length and width of the
| torso (starting from the eyeline down to the hands -- segments a2
| and b2) are in golden ratio.
|
| Since when does anyone measure a torso _starting at the
| eyeline_!?
|
| Lots of data dredging here.
| ABS wrote:
| I'm afraid the entire intro paragraph is wrong, it's one of those
| things "everyone knowns" but is in fact not true at all :-(
|
| The best summary of why this is I've ever found is Prof. Devlin
| 2012's Stanford session on this very topic:
|
| The Golden Ratio & Fibonacci Numbers: Fact versus Fiction
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oyyXC5IzEE
| xamuel wrote:
| Yes, people completely misunderstand what the golden rectangle
| is about and why it's important. Its importance lies in the
| fact that it's canonical, a rectangle motivated intrinsically,
| independent of anyone's preferences (conscious or unconscious)
| or any experiment: the same golden rectangle would naturally be
| discovered by aliens on the other side of the universe, or even
| in alternate universes with totally different laws of physics.
| People looking for golden ratios in seashells and things like
| that haven't just missed the point, they've missed it by
| 180deg, fired their arrows away from the target.
|
| (Of course, there's an even simpler canonical rectangle: the
| square. But that one's too trivial to be interesting.)
| humblepie wrote:
| https://www.fastcompany.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio-designs...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Mathematica uses the golden ratio as the default for plot
| dimensions; it does seem arbitrary but when you have to pick a
| number, why not this one?
|
| IMO the spiral stuff is very "seek, and you will find", but at
| least as a twist on the 'thirds rule' of photography it makes
| sense to me this way: the mind is always seeking a way to fold
| things, because if it finds something is symmetric down the
| middle, it only has to remember half of it. Basic compression.
| Thirds makes it a bit more "interesting" but even then you're
| better off breaking the rule: if a pattern looks _close_ to
| symmetric, we tend to linger on it, as our minds ' gears turn to
| say "is this easy to compress or not?". Kind of like a march vs
| swing music: an even tempo is easy to match and rather
| uninteresting, but once you add some entropy and syncopation, it
| becomes a locus for attention.
|
| As an aside, the golden rule "do unto others as you would have
| others do unto you" always seemed similar to the golden ratio's
| definition "the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the
| greater to the less", anyone else notice that? I always wondered
| if they're etymologically related.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| _In the study, participants with no background in art, were shown
| an original image and distorted versions of a statue. The
| original statue's proportions reflected the golden ratio. The
| original image strongly activated sets of brain cells that the
| distorted images did not, suggesting beauty is partly an innate
| quality._
|
| This doesn't sound like the best study design unless they also
| tested with statues whose original proportions were _not_ in the
| golden ratio. Otherwise you've just proven that people can tell
| when a human statue has been distorted and don't like it.
|
| I'm also unclear as to exactly how the vertical and horizontal
| lines on the Mona Lisa were chosen. Why didn't a1 go to the top
| of the head? Why did a2 go up to the eye and not some other
| facial feature? What determined the endpoints of b2? It seems
| like there were so many options available and no natural way to
| select between them, so I have to assume the endpoints were
| selected simply to produce a golden ratio. And one could do that
| with any image at all.
| jmole wrote:
| Was just thinking this. You can take one of these golden rulers
| and place it on nearly anything, roughly adjust it to size, and
| find a "match" somewhere in the image.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| I think that's the point. The significance of this is
| dependent on whether it holds true for other arbitrary ratio
| rulers.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| If you can match a golden ratio to everything, then it
| cannot identify anything. Certainly not beauty or good
| interfaces.
| [deleted]
| kevinventullo wrote:
| People making enormous leaps to find the golden ratio in
| everything reminds me of the "Illuminati" meme, where a triangle
| _anywhere_ in an image indicates Illuminati influence.
| mlajtos wrote:
| Jurgen Schmidhuber took this approach way before anybody else.
|
| https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/fibonacciwebdesign.html
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