I spy a Fibonacci sequence

It's been a while since my last post and that's because of other projects I've got going on that are becoming quite exciting. But I decided to take a break away from them and I found something worthy enough to make me take some time to post here again.

As I am happily reading (or at least looking) through my fancy Dengeki G's Festival Vol. 20 magazine which covers August's new upcoming game 穢翼のユースティア (Aiyoku no Eustia), I first notice something other than the wonderful illustrations:

I first notice the layout of the spreads, particularly, the sizes of the image boxes that they use within the spreads. At first glance, I say "Hey, that kind of looks phi-ish." jokingly because I know most of the time many designers don't think about phi as much as I would and it just happens to appear on designs. But then I get really curious and I bust out the good ol' ruler. To my surprise, it actually is a Fibonacci design! Behold: 

The width of the spread is 19 inches, which is unrelated to the Fibonacci design but I'm just saying that for reference of the actual spread size. The image boxes together on the spreads measure 13 inches roughly (as the character portrait covers the left edge). The width of the larger image box that goes over the spine measures 8 inches and the smaller image box located on the recto of the spread measures 5 inches exactly.

Then I look at the numbers and think: 13...8...5... I've seen this before. And indeed I have as they are numbers of the Fibonacci sequence which relates to phi. Pretty neat!

Now, I can't be sure if the designers thought about the Fibonacci sequence (or phi) when designing these spreads or if they care, but I certainly care because I thought the spreads looked nice in both design and of course illustration. That and I'm a math nerd...

HV Math; you got your Design in my Mathematics

As I'm doing some homework, placing images of my graphs into a nice little InDesign document to export into a neatly designed pdf that is easy to follow and read, I get curious about what font to use. I know that I'm not, but I certainly feel like the only person doing their math homework that spends 20-30 minutes deciding on what font to use just to write something like: 2x - 5y = 14. Not like that's a bad thing...equations can look pretty too!

HV Math Symbols

Anyways, it gets difficult sometimes to find the right font to do math in, especially when we get to some of the higher up stuff like in Calculus where those crazy math symbols are abundant. And if you do find the font that works for you, usually it's something very standard that you'd see in a textbook and that can get kind of boring.

Well I found something that would at least please the designers that might read this, because there is a font package that I found called HV Math. Although it is specifically for TeX/LaTeX (The Mathematician's version of InDesign, sort of), it's still pretty interesting that this was made for math purposes. HV stands for none other than the one and only HelVetica.

To think that the Helvetica virus would spread even to Mathematics...well at least it gave me a good chuckle.

You can find links to the TeX fonts as well as some more images of the typeface here: http://www.micropress-inc.com/fonts/hvmath/hvmain.htm

Infinitely Remembering This Guy

Well, to me he was more than just "This Guy." As stubborn as I am to say that I actually look up to someone, this is the one person I am proud to have called a role model. While he may not be familiar to most of the population as the President or Michael Jackson, he definitely made a huge impact on the entire world by defining the way we observe things.

"This Guy" was Benoit Mandelbrot, the Father of Fractal Geometry. "Father" is quite the title to have in one's life; to have discovered something that was valid enough for you to be known as the founder of it.

I could post some definitions about Fractal Geometry here, but I think I'll try a nutshell explanation from my own definition. Fractal Geometry is much like viewing recursion. You see something, and the more you want to see (by zooming in) you see more of that same something. If you blow up your image, you will find the pattern of this repetition thus revealing the fractal. These fractals are defined by numbers which may sound super boring but if you just look at them you can find them to be quite stunning.

But I admire Mandelbrot's work and his visions because he viewed things totally outside the box, defied what other people said about him, and just researched for the sake of research. That kind of determination is pretty inspiring for a person like me, who is attempting to blend these Graphic Arts with these numbers of Maths and such.

Benoit Mandelbrot passed away last year (2010) but many people still admire the legacy that he left behind.

I felt like posting about Mandelbrot because I just came across this article on the New York Times from my news read: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/26/magazine/2010lives.html#view=beno_t_mandelbrot