A Family of Cuts

The idea: unity and harmony

Unity is the sense that all the parts of a work belong together as one whole. Harmony is the agreement among parts that share qualities such as shape, color, size or direction.

In a notan: A notan starts with more unity than most designs. Everything comes from one sheet, every piece is the mirror of its hole, and there are only two values, or three when the back of the paper differs from its front. What breaks that unity is a vocabulary that sprawls: shapes from unrelated families, angles at every tilt, colors chosen one at a time. Harmony comes from agreement. Cuts drawn from one family of shapes, turned only to a short list of angles, lined up on shared lines and colored in one harmony read as a family, and the flip doubles every agreement, because each piece repeats its hole’s shape in the back color.

Unity is the feeling that a work is one thing, not a pile of things. Harmony is how it gets there: the parts agree. They may share a shape family, a direction, a size, a color or an edge quality. The more they share, the calmer the work; share everything and it grows dull, which is the subject of the companion activity on variety.

Designers win unity by writing rules before they draw. A type designer fixes stroke weights, a brand fixes a palette, and Otl Aicher fixed his angles. In this activity you write a short house style for a notan, hold a design to it, test it with an intruder, and stretch it across a series of three. Then you mix the house colors in paint and cut the family by hand.

Art history

Unity has been won in very different ways: one motif carried through a series, a handful of threads, sixty pictures painted at once, a strict geometric rule. Each of these works makes many parts read as one.

• Katsushika Hokusai Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830–32

  Across forty-six prints one subject returns: Mount Fuji, sometimes filling the sky, sometimes a small triangle seen past a wave, a barrel or a row of roofs. The earliest prints were printed largely in shades of blue, outlines included, using the newly imported Prussian blue. One motif and a limited palette hold a whole series together.

• Anni Albers Wall Hanging, 1926 Harvard Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Albers wove this hanging at the Bauhaus as a double weave, two layers of silk woven together. An analysis made for the museum in 1994 found just three colors of warp thread and two of weft, yet its rows of rectangles hold blacks, golds, grays and ivories. A small vocabulary, fully explored, is a strong source of unity.

• Jacob Lawrence The Migration Series, 1940–41 The Phillips Collection, Washington, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York

  Lawrence told the story of the Great Migration in sixty panels, each 12 by 18 inches. To keep them one work, he laid them out together and painted one color at a time across every panel before moving to the next. The same few colors and flat shapes run through the whole series, so each panel reads as a beat in one story.

• Otl Aicher and his design team Pictograms for the Olympic Games, Munich, 1972

  Aicher’s studio drew every sport on one grid, with lines held to horizontals, verticals and 45-degree diagonals and a consistent line weight. Every athlete is built from the same few parts, so each figure looks related to every other. It is the rule this activity asks of your cuts: a short list of angles.

Design today

Every modern brand and product relies on unity. A design system, such as Google’s Material Design, first published in 2014, sets a shared vocabulary of spacing, corner shapes, colors and type, so hundreds of designers can build screens that look like one product. Icon families work the same way: every icon drawn on one grid, at one stroke weight, with one corner treatment, so a new icon joins the set without announcing itself.

The idea is older than software. The graphics standards manual that Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda produced for the New York City Transit Authority in 1970 fixed one typeface, a set of colors and a modular sign panel for the whole subway, so a station anywhere spoke the same language. A brand palette does the same with color harmony: a few related colors, chosen together and used everywhere.

Warm-up

Sort before you make. Lay out twelve small shapes cut from black paper, or sketch them on a board: nine from one family, say triangles at a few angles, and three intruders, such as a circle, a star and a triangle at an odd tilt. Ask the group to find the intruders and name exactly what makes each one foreign: its family, its angle, its size or its edge. Those names are the qualities you will hold steady today.

In the studio

Make it in Studio Notan, where every cut can be moved, refolded and undone.

1. Write your house style on an index card. Family: triangles and hexagons, which share their angles, since a hexagon is six equilateral triangles meeting at the center. Angles: turns in multiples of 30 degrees only. Harmony: analogous or monochromatic. Every rule should be one you could check by eye.
2. Open the studio and choose the Triangle. Press where a center should be and drag outward; the triangle always stands point up. Make three or four in two sizes and fold each over its nearest edge. Add two shapes with the Hexagon.
3. Turn shapes only as the card allows. With Move, reach just outside a corner handle until the cursor becomes a curved arrow, then drag with Shift held, which turns in steps of 15 degrees. A 60-degree turn stands a triangle on its point; a 30-degree turn lays a hexagon on a flat side.
4. Put cuts on shared lines. Select three cuts that fold over the same edge and use Align, with its switch on “Selection”, to line up their centers or edges. Watch the pieces: they line up too, in mirror image, so cuts that fold upward and are aligned by their top edges have pieces aligned by their bottom edges. Try Distribute for even spacing.
5. Bind the colors. On the Color tab, give the Front a clear hue by dragging its F marker on the color wheel, then raise its brightness to about 60 with the slider under the marker, since a new design’s front is black. Close the padlock on the Front card and press “Analog”. The back and ground move 30 degrees either side of the front on the painter’s wheel, at the same saturation and lightness, so at first all three are equally light. Contrast must come from value: select the Ground and raise its brightness with the slider under its marker until the cuts read clearly. Compare “Mono” before you choose. See Analogous.
6. Test with an intruder. Draw one circle with the Ellipse and fold it out. Name what it breaks: family, angle or edge. Then press Undo twice: the first Undo reopens the flip chooser, the second lets the circle go. Try a triangle turned 45 degrees instead. Which intruder is harder to spot, and why?
7. Open Share, choose “Edit a copy” and send the link to a partner with your index card. They add one cut that obeys your house style and send back a link of their own. If their cut does not belong, the fault may be in the rules, not the cut: revise the card.

With paper and paint: Three paints, one family

In the studio, the Analog button keeps three colors in agreement with one press. With paint you make the agreement yourself. When every color is mixed from the same three paints, the colors share their ingredients, and shared ingredients are what make colors agree. Paint cannot be unmixed, so you learn to add the stronger paint a little at a time and to mix enough the first time. Jacob Lawrence painted one color at a time across all sixty panels of The Migration Series; mixing each of your colors once and carrying it across every paper holds your set together in the same way. And a template traced again and again makes a family of shapes more exactly than the eye can.

1. Choose three paints and no more: white and two hues that sit side by side on the color wheel, such as blue and green, for an analogous harmony, or one hue with black and white for a monochromatic one. Add them to your house style card.
2. Mix three colors, one each for front, back and ground, and make them differ clearly in value, as you raised the ground’s brightness in the studio. For an analogous palette, add a touch of the blue to the green mix and a touch of the green to the blue, so each carries a little of the other. Add the darker or stronger paint to the lighter a little at a time, because a mix cannot be taken back. Paint a swatch of each on scrap, let it dry, and lay the three together before you commit, since gouache often dries a shade lighter or darker than it looks wet.
3. Mix enough of each color for everything and keep it in a lidded jar, because a color mixed twice rarely matches. Paint one side of the 90 lb sheet with the front color. When it is dry, lay it face down on clean paper and paint the other side with the back color in a thin coat, so the first side does not wet again. Paint the 140 lb sheet with the ground color. Let all three dry fully, then press them flat under a stack of books.
4. Make templates. On scrap card, rule a base 1 inch long, set the compass to that length, and swing an arc from each end; where the arcs cross is the third corner of an equilateral triangle. Cut it out. Trace it six times around one point, turning it a sixth of a turn each time, to draw a hexagon, and cut that out too. Every cut you make will come from these two shapes.
5. Cut a 5-inch square from the two-sided paper and turn it so the back color faces up. Rule a light line parallel to one edge and trace three shapes from your templates along it: their holes will share that line, and when they turn over that edge, so will their pieces. Trace the templates near the edges, only at angles your card allows: triangles point up, point down or on their sides, hexagons on a flat side or on a point. Scissors can reach a shape that touches an edge; a shape inside the sheet needs the craft knife.
6. Cut each shape free, turn the sheet front color up, and turn each shape over its nearest edge like a page, so it lands back color up, as far outside the edge as its hole is inside. Lay the sheet and its pieces on the ground without glue. Now test with an intruder: cut a circle, or a triangle from a scrap in a color outside your three paints, and lay it among the pieces. Name what it breaks, then take it away. In paper there is no Undo, which is why the intruder stays loose.
7. Glue the sheet to the middle of the ground with a glue stick, then glue each piece face down in its mirrored place. A glue stick is drier than liquid glue, so it is less likely to wrinkle the paper or wet the paint again. Set the finished notan beside your studio design. Do they read as one family? If not, which rule on the card let them drift apart?

Take care: Use paints that carry the ACMI AP seal, cover the table, and let each side dry until it no longer feels cool against the back of your hand before you paint the other side or cut. Cut with the blade moving away from your body on a self-healing mat, with an adult close by for younger learners, and rinse brushes before the paint dries in them.

Take it further

Design a pictogram family in the spirit of Otl Aicher: six notan signs for the rooms of your school or home, each on the same sheet, built from one shape family, with every edge at 0, 45 or 90 degrees. Export each as a PNG from File and lay them in a row. Any sign that jumps out of the row has broken a rule; find which one.

Reflect

• Which rule on your card did the most to hold the design together, on screen and in paint: shape, angle or color?
• What exactly did the intruder break, and how quickly did others notice it?
• Did your partner’s cut belong? What would you add to the card to make sure the next one does?
• How does the flip itself, each piece repeating its hole, help unity, and where might it get in the way?

What to look for

• The design uses only the shapes, angles and colors named on its house style card.
• Related cuts share alignment lines, and their pieces echo that alignment.
• The color harmony is named and visible across front, back and ground.
• A viewer sees the three panels of the series as one set without being told.
• The painted papers come from no more than three paints, and front, back and ground differ enough in value for every hole and piece to read.