Golden Meaning is a compact paperback, printed in gold ink on Fedrigoni’s Arcoprint paper. The book, published and edited by Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright of GraphicDesign&, is an eclectic compilation of work by 55 designers and illustrators in response to a mathematical theme: the golden ratio.
Known as phi, this is an irrational number that expresses a ratio found throughout nature.
It is shown more prosaically on the cover as the non-recurring number 1.618…
Like GraphicDesign&’s previous publication Page 1: Great Expectations, Golden Meaning is a kind of college assignment for grown-ups. Where Page 1 invited 70 designers and typographers to typeset the opening sentences of Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations, Golden Meaning’s brief is looser, with results that are variously ingenious, baffling, entertaining and revealing. We discover, for instance, that Fred Deakin had a boyhood passion for the mathematical puzzles of Martin Gardner, and that George Hardie has a taste for golden Sauternes – specifically a (possibly fictional) bottle of Chateau d’Yquem, 1970.