Every notan begins with a sheet: one rectangle of paper with a face, a back, and a ground behind it. Everything you draw is judged against its edges, and every cut ends up inside it or folded out from it. This chapter is about that rectangle and the long history of paper it stands in for.
What it does
The PAPER section is on the Controls tab. Its two fields set the width and the height of the sheet. They read in inches or centimeters, whichever the in / cm switcher is set to, and the button beside them turns the sheet between portrait and landscape.
A new design starts on a sheet 4 inches wide and 5.5 inches tall. A design that already exists keeps its own size: the one your browser saved for you, a project you open, a shared design you follow a link to. The sheet can be as small as about half an inch (1.3 cm) or as large as about 20.8 inches (52.9 cm) in either direction.
Two regions share the canvas. The sheet is the paper, and shows the Front color. Around it and behind it is the ground, which shows the Background color. A shape drawn over the sheet becomes a cut: the hole shows the ground, and the piece that came out folds over an edge and lies beside the sheet, showing the Back color. A shape drawn over the ground outside the sheet works from the other side: it is mirrored onto the sheet across the fold of the piece it covers, or else the nearest edge, and the flip chooser opens with that edge’s arrow ready, so its piece lands where you drew it.
Change the size and the sheet grows or shrinks about its own center. Your shapes do not stretch with it. They stay exactly where they are, and every hole and every folded piece is worked out again against the new edges. A cut that sat safely inside a large sheet may cross the edge of a smaller one and become a notch; a piece that folded out over the right-hand edge now folds from wherever that edge has gone.
The size belongs to the design: it is saved with it, shared with it and recorded in every undo step, and ‘Reset’ → ‘Design’ leaves it alone.
Why it works this way
The app never cuts into the sheet for good. It keeps what you drew apart from the paper it is cut from, and rebuilds the visible sheet from the two whenever anything changes. That is why a new size cannot distort a cut: the shape you drew is still there, untouched, and only its relation to the edges is recalculated. An earlier approach that punched holes into the sheet for good was rejected because a resize or an undo would then bend shapes whose true outline was already lost.
The default is a size you can hold. At 4 × 5.5 inches the sheet is a quarter of an inch narrower than a quarter of a US Letter page (4.25 × 5.5), close to the international A6 (105 × 148 mm, about 4.1 × 5.8 inches), and inside the range the United States Postal Service accepts as a postcard, which runs from 3.5 × 5 to 4.25 × 6 inches. And because the app’s unit is a fixed fraction of an inch, a design made at that size exports at that size.
The ground is part of the design because the folded pieces need somewhere to land. In a paper notan the piece you cut out is not thrown away: it is hinged out beyond the edge and laid down, so the space around the sheet is as composed as the sheet itself. That is also why the artwork export is framed three sheets wide and four tall, with the sheet in the middle.
The metaphor
The sheet is a sheet of paper lying on a table. The Front is the face you see; the Back is the side that shows when a piece is turned over; the ground is the tabletop, or the mount board you will fix the finished work to. Cut with a knife and the hole shows whatever the paper lies on. Fold the loose piece out over the edge and you see its reverse, mirrored, like a page turned in a book.
The metaphor holds in the rules that matter: a piece folds across an edge like a hinge, keeps its shape exactly, and lands as its own mirror image. It breaks in three places worth knowing. Real paper has thickness, grain and a rough deckle edge; this sheet has none. Real paper cannot be enlarged after it has been cut; this one can, and everything folds itself again. And real paper tears at a narrow bridge, while here a sliver a hair wide holds together. If you mean to cut the design by hand or by machine, look for those slivers before you begin.
A history
In art
The word notan is Japanese, 濃淡, dark and light. It entered Western art teaching through Arthur Wesley Dow, who studied Japanese prints in the 1890s as assistant to Ernest Fenollosa in the Japanese collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and who made the arrangement of dark and light one of the pillars of his book Composition (1899).
Cutting light and dark from one sheet is far older than the word: Chinese jianzhi, Japanese kirie, Mexican papel picado and Polish wycinanki all begin with a sheet whose edges are fixed before the first cut, and composing means deciding what those edges allow. Henri Matisse, late in life, cut painted paper into compositions the size of walls.
In printing
Chinese histories credit the court official Cai Lun with presenting paper to the emperor in 105 CE, but fragments found at Fangmatan in Gansu are more than two centuries older. Tradition says the Korean monk Damjing brought papermaking to Japan in 610, where it became washi, made from the long inner-bark fibres of kōzo (paper mulberry), gampi and mitsumata. Westward, paper was being made in Baghdad by the 790s and at Xàtiva in Spain by the eleventh or twelfth century; the papermakers of Fabriano in Italy made the first European watermarks.
For centuries every sheet was made by hand, lifted from a vat of pulp on a mold, a fine screen in a frame, with a loose frame called the deckle holding the pulp at the edges. The mold set the size of the sheet, and the mold could only be as big as one person could lift and shake level. Sizes were named after their watermarks: foolscap after a jester’s cap and bells, pott after a pot, crown after a crown. In Bologna, a marble slab now in the city’s museum of medieval art is carved with four rectangles, generally dated to 1389, that fixed the sizes paper could be made in: imperiale, reale, mezzana and rezzuta.
The standard most of the world uses now was first sketched in a letter by the German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in 1786: a sheet whose sides are in the ratio 1 : √2 can be cut in half and keep its shape. A French tax law of 1798 used such proportions; Germany made them a standard, DIN 476, in the early 1920s, building the A series from A0, a sheet of one square meter; and in 1975 it became the international standard, ISO 216. A4 is A0 halved four times, A6 six times.
North America went its own way. A committee on paper sizes formed in 1921, as part of Herbert Hoover’s drive against industrial waste at the Department of Commerce, recommended a short list of basic sheets, among them 17 × 22 inches; US Letter is that sheet quartered, and a quarter of Letter is 4.25 × 5.5. The American Forest and Paper Association traces the numbers back to the hand mold: eleven inches, it says, is about a quarter of the stretch of an experienced vatman’s arms. It is a good story, and hard to prove.
In technology
The mold’s limit on size ended with the machine. Nicolas-Louis Robert patented a machine that made paper as one continuous web in France in 1799; the machine that grew from it in England, named after the Fourdrinier brothers who paid for its development, is still how most paper is made. In the 1840s Friedrich Gottlob Keller in Germany and Charles Fenerty in Nova Scotia each showed that paper could be made from ground wood, and paper became cheap. Sheets were now cut from a reel, so their sizes had to be agreed rather than set by the reach of a pair of arms.
Computers borrowed the sheet as a picture of a page: the Xerox Alto, built at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, had a screen taller than wide so that a whole Letter page could be seen at once. Studio Notan’s sheet is that idea at its simplest, a rectangle measured in fractions of an inch, drawn with a graphics library that is itself called Paper.js.
In professional software
Every design program has a sheet like this one. Illustrator calls it an artboard, InDesign a page, Photoshop a canvas and AutoCAD a layout. What transfers is the idea this chapter rests on: the frame and the artwork are separate things, and changing one need not change the other.
- Adobe Illustrator. Choose the Artboard tool (Shift-O), then type a width and height or drag the artboard’s edges. Resizing an artboard leaves the artwork on it at its own size, as here, and art may lie on the canvas outside every artboard, much as pieces lie on the ground.
- Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop splits the job in two. ‘Image › Image Size’ changes the size of the picture itself, normally by resampling its pixels; ‘Image › Canvas Size’ adds or trims space around it and leaves the pixels as they are. Canvas Size, anchored at the center, is the one that behaves like the size fields here.
- Adobe InDesign. ‘File › Document Setup’ sets the page size. It also sets the bleed, a margin beyond the trim that artwork runs into so that the cut edge is clean, and the slug, a strip beyond that for notes to the printer.
- Autodesk AutoCAD. You draw in model space at full size, with no sheet at all. The sheet is a layout in paper space, where viewports look onto the model at a chosen scale, and
PAGESETUPsets its paper size. It is the separation Studio Notan makes, taken further. - Cricut Design Space and Silhouette Studio. Cutting software frames the design with the machine’s mat. Silhouette Studio’s Page Setup panel sets the media size and the mat, and Cricut Design Space lays your shapes out on a mat when you send them to cut.
What carries over. Decide the frame first, and before any resize ask whether the command changes the frame, the artwork, or both. Here it is always the frame alone; elsewhere it depends on the command, and Photoshop’s Image Size is the one that most often surprises.
Try this
- Draw a cut that just crosses the right-hand edge, then make the sheet an inch wider. The notch becomes a hole inside the sheet, and its folded piece disappears.
- Set the sheet to A6 (10.5 × 14.8 cm), then to a quarter of Letter (4.25 × 5.5 in), and compare both with the default.
- Draw a shape on the ground just beyond an edge, and see the paper it puts back.
Going further
Read on with Inches and centimeters, Rotate the sheet and Flipping.
- Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft
- Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History
- Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition