About designing and making

If you want to break away,

Keith Newton

Then you need to leave the flat plane behind, not to mention possibly the "Golden Ratio" idea. Some rules are meant to be broken, and the more you try to stuff them into a smaller box of constraints, the harder it is to achieve any semblance of originality if that is your goal.

Re: If you want to break away,

TomD

I have never really found anything that was improved in my designs by the "Golden Ratio". That design of Bill's I stole above, actually looks pretty good in the two GR versions. But in the more formal schools, and I know little about them, the GR is often in many little segments and aspects. On the face of a guitar for instance, the body is not GR, though maybe a Baroque guitar might have been, but the dimensions of the lower bout, might be. And it might be applied in several respects to to the face. There is a local guy who has a whole book of guitar drawings, and he has related them to such design controls. Most of us are too naive in these matters to really know how to apply them. But every now and again there is someone who has made a study of it, and it is interesting to let them spin on.