Page layouts with the Golden Ratio

August 6, 2014 5:44 pm by Neil Cohn

I was recently sent a link to this blog post from back in May that discusses the “Golden Ratio” in the creation of comic pages by Bizhan Khodabandeh. He has some interesting ideas about how basic geometric shapes can underlie page composition in a way that’s pleasing to the eye. He therefore advocates using the “rule of three” to divide up pages and space, coming at the issue from a very “graphic design” perspective.

I’m not sure if I’m convinced that these pages are aesthetically more appealing or easier to understand than pages that may not follow these exact ratios, but the idea is interesting nonetheless. Following such ratios may lead to some unintended consequences though… by so rigidly following the underlying shapes in the example above, it looks like the bird’s legs are at an awkward angle such that the body weight wouldn’t be supported by them. But, this is a very minor issue I’d think, and the ideas are definitely worth checking out.

Essentially, what the author is talking about is the relationship between External Compositional Structure (ECS)—the physical relations of panels on a page—and Internal Compositional Structure (ICS)—the organization of elements within a panel. The ideas of making these elements interact has long been a focus of both comic creators and comic theorists (Groensteen talks about this a lot).

What I find interesting here specifically is how far it pushes this interaction in treating the page as an aesthetic canvas. In research on ECS specifically, one of my students coded American superhero comics from the 1940s through the Present and argued that page layouts have been growing in their treatment of “pages as aesthetic canvases” rather than treating them like containers of “panels in a flow of information.”

That is, authors are becoming more sensitive to how the page as a whole works as an aesthetic whole. The ideas in this blog post make such ideas very explicit.

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