The Golden Ratio: Our Design Foundation

The Golden Ratio is one of the foundational elements we have used in the design of our Awardology awards.

The Golden Ratio is a mathematical ratio that was first referenced around the year 500 B.C. in ancient Greece, around the year 500 B.C. Two of the key protagonists of the Golden Ratio were the Greek scholars Euclid and Pythagoras. The Golden Ratio expressed as an equation is: (A+B)/A = A/B. Expressed as an integer, this works out to: 1.618 (it’s an irrational number, so the decimals go on forever).

Throughout our history, the Golden Ratio has been used as the design foundation for many of the classic, iconic works of art and architecture, including Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the Parthenon in Athens, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, Salvador Dali’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper, and, going back even further, Stonehenge.

The primary reason the Golden Ration is used so often in art, architecture and design is that its harmony and proportion are appealing to the human eye. It’s as if our brains are hardwired to prefer designs based on the Golden Ratio.

A key reason for this preference could be that the Golden Ratio consistently reveals itself in nature, across a broad and diverse plethora of objects. Flowers, seashells, hurricanes, galaxies, Nautiluses, human faces, and even DNA molecules conform to this ratio. This could be the reason our brains, over time, have evolved to prefer images that conform to this formula. This preference has then been transferred to the inorganic objects that we design and create.

Given all of this, we have used the Golden Ratio as a core element of our Awardology designs. We hope you see the beauty, balance and harmony reflected in the simple, proportional, minimalist designs in the Awardology family!