Prepping for tonight’s Sketchbook Mixed Media Class at ASUC Berkeley, I pulled together sample taxonomies:

The Bescher’s water towers (though I would have loved to get a picture of SFMOMA’s print of superimposed water towers)

Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on Sunset Strip

And made a mock of a sample grid, with lifted pics of donuts.

Donuts on a grid! Hi-larious.

This grid allowed me to talk about margins, columns and gutters, as well as introduce real-life uses of algebra :

How does one determine column widths?
Say our page is 12 inches, our margins 0.5 inches, that leaves us an 11-inch wide art area.
column widths = A
gutter widths = B
4a x 3b = 11 inches
Assigning B a width of 0.25 inches, A = 5.125 or 5–1/8 inches

Most 7th graders don’t take trips from Zurich to Paris. Then again, most don’t make grids to draw taxonomies, either, but for a nerdy art kid like me this would have been great!

[ADDENDUM: A week later, Linda Yablonsky blogged about a grid of donuts by ___ as part of the Miami art fairs festivities (“Art Basel Miami Beach: The Pre-Game Show,” New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 2009). Something’s in the air, and I think it smells like donuts.]