Did you know that Fibonacci had a golden retriever who inspired his spiral aptly called “Golden Spiral”? (Hey, I am joking!)
The Fibonacci spiral is frequently regarded as an approximation to the “golden spiral”, which is a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is ø, the golden ratio.
No mere coloring book, You Can’t Possibly Color This! is an eye-spinning experience that will inspire and astound. That’s because you’ll be coloring in optical illusions — things that can only exist on the page. With a just a few tips, you’ll be coloring in things that will bulge, expand, and even rotate. Other objects will leave you confused as you try to figure out the “trick,” while mandalas, complex patterns, and labyrinths will mesmerize you. Also included are fun activities for drawing and creating your own optical illusions.
“Why do the digits look like they do?” to answer this recurrent question one may find on the web many strange and diverse theories on the origin of the shapes of our modern, Hindu-Arabic numerals. Unfortunately, most if not all of those theories are patently false! One that went viral claims: “Our present method of writing figures is based on an early Arabic geometric design (see below) where each digit contains its own number of corners or angles, for instance the digit 1 contains one angle, the digit 3 has three angles, the digit 7 has seven angles and so on.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s just plain nonsense!
Let us leave aside these abstruse theories, as there are a whole range of serious and documented books on the origin of numbers, including Georges Ifrah’s excellent book “Universal History of Numbers“.
However, there is nothing preventing us from finding or inventing original and / or fun typographic methods to create numbers, like the one illustrated below, which requires only two stylized numerals: a 4 and a 8.
This wavy floor is actually a mind-boggling optical illusion that discourages people from running down the hallway (in fact, the floor is a completely flat surface!).
Manchester firm Casa Ceramica used a neat combination of black and white tiles to make the floor along the hallway look as though it is uneven making the tiles appear to slope away into a dip.
The illusion only works in one direction, so you will be perfectly safe on the way out.
The making of the floor.
Many visual illusions have already been used to try and slow down traffic like this 3D-painted zebra crossing trialed in Iceland that provides an illusory effect of white blocks floating over the road.
Klein quartic has 24 symmetries forming a group isomorphic to the rotation/reflection symmetry group of a tetrahedron. Algebraically speaking, this group is S4: the permutations of 4 things.
Pattern with Arabesque paths moving in a linear fashion induces rotational motion to a hexagonal device.
Where does the extra skull come from? Magic? Can you explain how does this trick work?
This puzzle is available as print from my online store.
This is one of my favorite book projects commissioned by Imagine Publishing.
[You can get this book from Amazon US or Amazon UK]
This book dissects the most fascinating and confounding black and white optical illusions, patterns and tiling, explaining in a concise fashion how they work, how to design and create them, and how to personalize and play with them to your heart’s content. With accessible yet fascinating text and workable samples, this intriguing art ‘cookbook’ is appropriate for graphic designers, teachers, artists, art lovers and the curious who enjoys contemplating how the mind works and how the eye sees.
In the excerpt below I explain how to create a self-moving pattern. Continue Reading
Hexagonal-section structure made with pencils.
