Four Beats Along an Edge

The idea: rhythm

Rhythm is a principle of design created by repeating elements at planned intervals, so the eye moves through a work with a sense of beat. Rhythm can be regular, alternating, progressive or flowing.

In a notan: In a notan, every cut sounds twice: once as a hole in the sheet and once as the mirrored piece folded out over an edge. Set cuts along one edge and the edge becomes a bar line, with holes on one side and pieces on the other: hole, piece, hole, piece. Keep the shape and the gap the same and the beat is regular. Swap between two shapes or two orientations and it alternates. Let each cut grow, shrink or turn by a steady step and the rhythm is progressive. Let sizes and gaps swell and ease like water and it flows. Because pieces show the back color and holes show the ground, a notan can even play its rhythm in three values, like three notes.

Rhythm is repetition with timing. A row of fence posts, a line of text, a drum pattern: each repeats something at intervals, and the intervals are what we feel. Art teachers name four main kinds, and some add a fifth, random rhythm. A regular rhythm repeats the same element at the same interval. An alternating rhythm swaps between two or more elements, like a checkerboard. A progressive rhythm changes by a steady step, growing larger, smaller, closer or more turned each time. A flowing rhythm follows curves, with intervals that swell and ease like waves.

A notan is an unusually good place to feel rhythm, because each cut makes two marks: the hole, and the mirrored piece beyond the edge. Cut along one edge and you see the beat twice, once inside the sheet and once outside, with the edge between them like a bar line in written music. In this activity each edge of the sheet gets its own rhythm, and the studio’s Copies does the counting for you. Then you count for yourself, with a brush, a ruler and a pair of scissors.

Art history

People have set visual beats for thousands of years, and some of the clearest examples are, like a notan, flat shapes of dark and light. Each of these four works keeps time in its own way, and each returns in the cuts you are about to make.

• Dipylon Master (attributed) Dipylon Amphora, c. 760–750 BCE National Archaeological Museum, Athens

  This grave marker from an Athenian cemetery is wrapped in painted bands of meander, the Greek key, repeated without a break. In the central panel, mourners stand in a row of dark silhouettes, arms raised to their heads. Look at the regular rhythm: the same figure at the same interval, the simplest beat there is.

• Paul Klee Rhythmisches (Rhythmical), 1930 Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris

  Klee, a trained violinist who taught at the Bauhaus, painted rows of black, gray and white blocks in a repeating three-part beat, then, from the fourth row on, broke it with syncopation and variation. It is an alternating rhythm in three values, like front, back and ground, and it shows that a beat can be interrupted on purpose.

• Piet Mondrian Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–43 Museum of Modern Art, New York

  Mondrian reached New York in 1940 and fell for boogie-woogie, a piano music driven by a repeated bass. Here he dropped his usual black lines and broke his bars of color into short blocks of yellow, red, blue and gray, so the grid pulses at every crossing. Look for syncopation: a regular grid whose accents land off the expected count.

• Henri Matisse Jazz, 1947

  Matisse composed the twenty plates of this book from sheets his assistants had painted with gouache and he cut with scissors. His publisher, Tériade, suggested the title, and Matisse liked its link to a music of improvisation. In the plates called The Lagoon, undulating shapes rise and fall across the page. This is flowing rhythm: intervals that swell and ease rather than tick like a clock.

Design today

Designers talk about rhythm constantly, usually as spacing. A layout grid, of the kind Josef Müller-Brockmann set out in Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981), gives a page a regular beat of columns and gutters. Many digital design systems space everything in multiples of one unit, often 8 pixels, so margins, gaps and the sizes of components keep time with one another. Type designers work at a finer scale: spacing a typeface means balancing the dark of the strokes against the light inside and between the letters until a line of text has an even texture. That is notan at the size of a letter.

In motion design, rhythm is timing. Items in a list that arrive one after another, each a few hundredths of a second after the last, read as one gesture; the same items arriving together read as a jolt. Easing, the speeding up and slowing down within each movement, turns a regular beat into a flowing one. Studio Notan’s Replay works the same way: it plays every flip at a steady interval, so a rhythm can be watched in time.

Warm-up

Clap four rhythms before you cut anything. Regular: clap, clap, clap, clap, evenly. Alternating: loud, soft, loud, soft. Progressive: start slowly and speed up, each gap a little shorter than the last. Flowing: sway, letting long and short gaps ease into one another. Then, on scrap paper, draw each rhythm as a row of marks along one edge of a rectangle, one mark for each clap. Keep the four strips: they are the plans for your notan.

In the studio

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

1. Open the studio. A new design starts on a sheet 4 inches wide and 5.5 inches tall. Press the rotate button beside the size in the Paper section to turn it to landscape, so the long edges run across. Leave Flipping on “Each shape”, so every cut asks at once which edge it folds over.
2. Regular, along the top. Choose the Rectangle, drag a small square just inside the top edge (hold Shift once the drag has begun), and press ↑ in the flip chooser. The paper folds up over the top edge and lands as a mirror image in the back color. That is one beat: a hole and its piece.
3. Now let the studio keep time. Choose Move, click the square, and find Transform on the Controls tab. Set Move Horizontal to a little more than the square’s width, set Copies to 6, and study the preview before you press Apply. Seven squares now march along the edge, and each copy folds over the same edge as its parent. Hole, piece, hole, piece: a regular rhythm.
4. Alternating, along the bottom. Draw a small Triangle just inside the bottom edge and fold it down with ↓. Select it, and in Transform turn on Reflect X, set a horizontal move and 6 copies. Reflecting across the line you move along makes the copies alternate like footprints: point up, point down, point up. The pieces below the edge alternate with them.
5. Progressive, up the left side. Draw a small circle with the Ellipse (Shift, once dragging) near the lower end of the left edge, above the triangles, and fold it left with ←. In Transform set Scale to 85 percent, a negative Move Vertical (down is positive, so negative goes up) and 5 copies. Copies compound, so each circle is smaller than the last and each gap shorter: the row seems to run away from you. For a step in angle instead, give a triangle a 15-degree turn with its move, and the row bends into an arc.
6. Flowing, down the right side. Slide Drawing toward Smooth, choose Draw, and draw three or four leaf or wave shapes down the right edge, letting their sizes and gaps swell and ease rather than repeat exactly. Fold each one out with →. A flowing rhythm is the one you cannot count exactly, only feel.
7. Press ▶, Replay, beside the zoom control. The studio plays every flip again in the order you made it, a new one every 0.78 seconds: a steady tempo of about 77 beats a minute. Watch each edge as it plays. Where a regular beat stumbles, select those cuts and use Distribute to even their spacing, or step back with Undo.

With paper and paint: Paint the beat, then cut it

In the studio, Copies counts for you and Undo takes back a beat that lands wrong. With a brush the beat lives in your arm: press, lift, move, press, and a mark that lands early stays early. A round brush also does something Copies cannot. Pressed harder it swells and lifted it thins, so a flowing rhythm comes straight from the hand. Matisse had his papers for Jazz painted with gouache before he cut them with scissors, and here too the paint comes first. Then the scissors keep time, and because a cut cannot be taken back, you measure every interval before the blade moves.

1. Start with the paint, so it can dry while you work in the studio. With the 1-inch brush, cover one side of a cardstock sheet with black in two thin coats, the second brushed across the first, and leave the back white. Mix a middle gray from black and white and paint the second sheet with it. Black front, white back, gray ground: the three values of Klee’s Rhythmisches. Keep the coats thin, because thick paint can crack when the paper bends.
2. Now paint the beat. Load the half-inch flat brush with black, press it flat on a watercolor strip, lift it, and press again one mark’s width along. Count aloud as you go, as you clapped in the warm-up. Paint a regular row, then an alternating row of flat presses and round dots, then a progressive row in which each gap is a little shorter than the last. Whatever lands early stays early: look for the places where the beat stumbles.
3. On the second strip, paint a flowing row with the round brush. Press down to swell the mark, ease off to thin it, and let the gaps widen and narrow like a wave. This is the rhythm a brush plays better than any ruler. Keep both strips: they are the score for your cuts.
4. When the black sheet is dry, cut a piece 7 inches wide and 5 inches tall and turn it white side up. Along one long edge, starting 1/4 inch from the corner, draw seven 1/2-inch squares touching the edge, 1/2 inch apart. Cut each one free, turn the sheet black side up, and turn each square over its edge as you would turn a page, so it lands white side up, touching the edge where its hole does. Measure, cut, turn; measure, cut, turn: you feel the regular beat in your hands before you see it.
5. Along the opposite edge, cut one of your painted rows: the alternating or the progressive. For an alternating beat, swap between a square and a triangle of the same width. For a progressive beat, start with a 3/4-inch square and make each one 1/8 inch smaller, or keep the squares the same and shorten each gap. Turn each piece over that edge the same way. Lay the sheet and its pieces on the gray ground beside the strip: is the cut beat the one your brush played?
6. Glue the sheet to the middle of the gray ground with a glue stick on its white back, then glue each piece in place, black side down. A glue stick is drier than liquid glue, so it is less likely to wrinkle the paper or wet the paint again. Press the notan under a book until the glue has set.
7. Read it back. Set the painted strips above the notan and tap each mark and each cut in turn. Ask a partner to name each rhythm. Then compare: where the brush wobbled and the ruler did not, which beat feels more alive?

Take care: Cover the table, use paints that carry the ACMI AP seal, which marks art materials certified as non-toxic, and let the black sheet dry until it no longer feels cool against the back of your hand before you cut it. Cut with scissors, or draw the craft knife away from your body along a metal ruler 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

Translate music into cuts. Choose a short piece with a clear beat and plan a notan in which each bar becomes a group of cuts along one edge, strong beats as large cuts and weak beats as small ones. Build the cuts in the order the music plays them and use Replay to watch the score. Then Share it with “Edit a copy” so a classmate can add a second voice along the opposite edge.

Reflect

• Which of your four rhythms did a partner name first, and what made it easy to read?
• Does the beat in your design come more from the holes, from the pieces, or from the pairs they make across the edge?
• Replay kept a steady tempo and your brush did not. Which beat, the studio’s or your hand’s, felt more alive, and why?
• Klee broke his own beat on purpose. Where could a single break make one of your rhythms stronger?

What to look for

• Each of the four rhythms can be named from the design alone, without a label.
• The regular row has even intervals, and the progressive row changes by a visible, consistent step.
• Holes and their pieces read together as one beat across each edge.
• The learner can point to a moment in Replay that confirms or contradicts the tempo they intended.
• The cut rows on paper keep the beat of their painted strip, and each piece touches its edge where its hole does.