Use whatever size paper best expresses what you want to express. Cut down some paper if you have to. Painters have been stretching canvas over a huge variety of dimensions, seems to have worked out fine for them.
8:5 is a close approximation of the golden ratio (1.61803). Which means if you rotate it you can show two panels of the same aspect ratio at half the size, repeat ad infinitum. The usefulness of an approximation (1.6:1) is that in a computer monitor you don’t end up with a weird number of pixels. You instead get 1920x1200 or 1680x1050 or something along those lines.
Maybe because it’s 11pm on a Friday and I’m in a post-Netflix-micro-binge-daze but I have to wonder—Boing Boing, defender against all litigation that would curb creativity, seems like the last place on Earth that would confer ownership of an element as basic as aspect ratio to one manufacturer of notepads. Have ye all gone daft, mate? What has happened to Boing Boing? You’ve lowered the Jolly Roger and hoisted the flag of a digital Lillian Vernon.
Oh jeez, embarrassing, I should have divided it out! 1.618… I would have recognized I promise I swear. Which is (coincidentally?!?) very near to the ratio of miles to kilometers! Which I know off the top of my head because I currently drive a car which emigrated from Canada so I am always converting kmh to mph on the fly which I feel brings me closer to our European brothers in a neuro-linguistic sense – but did you know they have 37 different words for “pâté”?! And kilometers having come from those math-addicted atheistic French revolutionaries maybe it wasn’t even a coincidence. Oo la la.
Anyway the history of the golden mean is good fun. A lot of it is… not exactly evidentiastically-oriented? but the desire to impose simple linear order on a recursively-complex world is understandable, and even if (when) it doesn’t work out, so cute! Especially when it’s mathematicians codifying aesthetics, or artists co-opting mathematics for validation, and then there’s the willful “reinterpretation” of biological measurements (c.f. E. Haeckel) – all in a worthy cause of course of course.
Oh man, the Maruman Mnemosyne has the most amazing art paper, so good, for pencil or fountain pen or brush pen. Ran across them in like Taiwan I think? years back but gave them up as being a bit pricey for my paper-hungry scrawling habits. I bind my own now so a spiral bound notebook doesn’t appeal but maybe they sell the loose paper? Likely not, but a worthy search project. Thanks for reminding me!
We used to live down the street from a paper company, and they’d sell big stacks of pads of various weights, colors, and sizes, neatly packaged in shrink-wrapped pyramids, for $1. (This was in the 80s, so prices have undoubtedly changed.) I’d get a few at a time & put them away until I needed another notepad or scratchpad.
I was so sad when I used up the last one, a heavyweight dark green 3"x4" pad. It was last because the only thing that could be seen on it was silver paint pens or sharpies.
I would have considered selling these as a Spirit-Write-Happy-Glow bundle but for the legal and ethical issues involved in mailing scorpions across state lines.
