Help redsigning a tartan

[OC Richard]

One thing to perhaps keep in mind when designing a tartan is the proportions.

Most of the rectilinear things we see (television screens, monitors, windows, painting, photographs, cell phones, postage stamps, posters, books, mirrors, many walls, many tables, etc etc) are made, more or less according to the sense of proportion analyzed and consciously used by the ancient Greeks and by Western culture ever since. It is called The Golden Proportion, Golden Mean, or Golden Ratio. (It is related to The Rule Of Thirds in my opinion.)

Many traditional tartans follow this near-universal aesthetic too, for designs that violate it tend to strike us (usually unconsciously, unless one has had art or design training) as unsettled, ungainly, cumbersome, inelegant, or simply 'not right'. Were one to create an entire home (completely furnished) based on a proportion different from the Golden one people walking through it would find it inexplicably unsettling.

Things which are 50/50 aren't as ungainly as ones more subtly divergent for some reason. Here's a simplified version of Wizard's tartan attempting to get as 50/50 as possible (I was unable to get it to look absolutely even no matter how I arranged the thread count)



Here are the same elements rearranged in more classic proportions, as weavers have been using for hundreds of years



and flipped the other way



Neither perhaps is as strong as the 50/50 one, the upper one in this post.

What strikes the eye, at least the trained one, as unsettled or conflicted is if the proportions are neither 50/50 nor follow traditional classic proportions. When I look at this it seems like the various elements are fighting for dominance rather than working together



Another thing (while I'm up here on my soapbox) is to try to get past our post-Allen Brothers tendency to create simplistic diagrammatic tartans, and try to get back to the ethos of many early tartans which were often quite complex, sometimes to the point of looking dissipated. Here's an attempt at throwing aside the Sobieski curse and make something with more meat in it



Here is perhaps my favourite, striking a balance between complexity and simplicity