This is not a great drawing...

and yet I find it pleasing on quick glance. Why is that? It's a sketch from a set of quilt design ideas in one of my sketchbooks, and looking through them I was struck by this one.
When sketching, I thought about the strip quilt process -- sort of a loose log cabin, where the quilt is built up by strip sections rather than carefully measured squares -- and built up the drawing similarly.
There's no golden ratio or nice spiral here, and yet the proportions seem right. How do we judge that, internally? What... oh wait. Maybe there is a spiral shape - but it's in the shapes darkened, rather than the large-blocks-to-smaller-blocks that were the "spiral" of how I built up the drawing. So I somehow imposed a spiral after the initial drawing was laid out without really thinking about it. Cool.
(It also looks a little bit like Cape Cod, but the red shape at the top right would have to curve or be cut down a bit - Provincetown doesn't go that far into Cape Cod Bay!)
If I think too much about all this when sketching, the sketches turn out like engineering drawings. Neat, but without life. It's almost as if the aesthetic pleasure is diminished if the rules are adhered to too closely.
I wonder if that's measurable. Could an experiment be devised where subjects are asked to evaluate the pleasingness of a set of abstract shapes generated by computer to conform to strict proportional rules vs similar shapes that break those rules by some degree?

Sketchbook Numbers Quilt

Maybe it's time for open source fonts. After I typed that, I remembered "google first" (today's RTFM) and realized of course there's a lot of thought around that, and in exactly the direction I was thinking. More variety of fonts available more widely for web design.

Of course, even after solving the problem of ensuring the font you want is on all systems (even microsoft), ya gotta ask: Do we really want more fonts available? Aren't most websites ugly enough?

I have a long-held prejudice against a layout containing more than maybe two typefaces. When I was in gradeschool, I'd often stop after school at our small town weekly, where my mother might be laying out the paper. She'd be standing at the layout table, holding her "scalpel" (exacto-knife), moving articles and ads around with a very literal cut-and-paste technique. She'd grumble about some of the pre-designed ads that would come in which were "messy" - too many words, too many typefaces, too crowded, too ugly.

I'd listen to her while copying letterforms out of a linotype typeface catalog with a blue mark-up pencil.

She made me love simple designs with well-chosen typefaces.

Babydoll Blankets

When I was little, my grandmother let me take small pieces of fabric from her scrap basket to make "babydoll blankets". I sat on her lap at her sewing machine and pieced together scraps of polyester doubleknit (hey, it was the late 60s). I didn't call it piecing or quilting, and we certainly didn't consider it art. It was the beginning of my love of quilts, and the whole idea of making something beautiful from the leftovers.

Cardboard Quilt

Here's a quilt on my desk. What do you do when you have paint chips that are sticky on one side? You make something. Paint chips on black matboard 2006. Desk 2008. (OK, why do they make sticky paint chips, anyway?)

Ninepatch

This ninepatch is leather on acrylic on canvas. A note about the leather - it was scrap leather my grandmother bought years ago from a coat factory. She would take the scrap leather, piece it together on muslin like a crazy quilt, but usually all the same color leather, and make coats out of it. These are from some scraps that never made it onto a coat.