The written form of language possesses the same set of rules than the oral mode of language, but also contains visual characteristics that need another set of visual rules to decode it. These set of additional syntactic rules inside the written language are called the rules of typography. Some examples of those rules are the indentation of paragraphs or the direction in which we read. There are mainly two types of typographic rules: the ones that enable us to decode the text and the ones that serve a more aesthetic value. The first set of rules represents the essential function of typography and is focused basically on the legibility of the text and the perfect decoding of the message that it contains. The second set of rules relates more to the appearance of the type. It appeals to the formal components of the type and its power to evoque mind constructions and associations that enable us to interpret the type and the message in a more extended way.

The human being has the ability to combine simple gestalts in order to understand more complex and elaborated forms, like the human body. But our capacity goes beyond understanding and brings us to imitate the forms we see. It is under that notion that visual communications and the practice of design and typography works. Through mimesis – the concept of imitating - we can also create objects guided by previously existent forms that can be an exact reproduction of reality or an abstract form of mimesis.

The human fascination for replicating the world has gone to the extent of undergoing an immense amount of research and analysis in order to understand the anatomic structure to its perfection. The idea of the perfect proportion and symmetry has been associated with beauty since the times of ancient Greece. In philosophy, especially with Aristotle, the idea of the perfect balance (the Golden Mean) is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. Within the Mathematical field the Golden Mean takes a numeric value of 1.618… also know as the divine proportion or the golden ratio. This golden ratio is the limit of the ratios of consecutive terms of the Fibbonacci numbers. The Fibbonacci numbers is a numerical sequence in which each term beyond the second is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21,…)

Inside the world of art and visual communications the Golden Mean has been used as an ideal proportion on which to base lines, shapes and visual elements. It highly influenced classcal Greek sculpture and inpired Leonardo Da Vinci in his studies of proportion. The truth is that have been using the Golden Ratio for building structures and creating grids for written pages. Just as the Golden Mean is a structure to achieve perfect beauty through proportion, there are other rules and systems that produce less harmonious results, but rich in communication value nonetheless.