• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Fab Functional Form: Engineered Aesthetics

Lobeydosser said:
Fender Stratocaster vs Telecaster.
While I know many guitar players who like both I've always felt the Tele looks like an unfinished Strat.
jtIFKyp.jpg


Just need to have it sitting on the back seat of a 68 Mustang :cool:
7xCv7Zv.jpg
Click to expand...
Three beautiful examples. The only hideous Mustang is the awful Mk 2, which nearly destroyed the band. Oh and the one my wife had. But she replaced it with a 4 litre Jeep Wrangler Sahara so that was OK.

I've met a surprising number of lead guitarists that stick up for the Telecaster - I'd have thought the Strat beat it hands down in all respects, but what do I know? I'm only a bassist.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Isn't it primarily in the eye of the beholder though?

To many people, the old 2CV was plug-ugly, but I fell totally in love with its relaxed curves and whole retro vibe:

View attachment 30306

Whereas to me, the ugliest and most unlikeable car I've ever owned was a Volvo 244, which I only bought because a FOAF was offering it very cheap.
Very heavy fuel consumption and utterly charmless.

View attachment 30308
Click to expand...
Agree with both. The 2CV has good proportions, the Volvo is shaped (and drives like) a brick.
 
Krepostnoi said:
Interesting things certainly emerge, especially around wheel diameter and headstock position, when you superimpose a golden ratio overlay on a picture of a Norton ES2, centring it as best you can on the front and rear wheel spindles (bearing in mind that the bike was not exactly side on in the photo)...
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the the GR had been very deliberately used in the design: artists, architects, engineers and designers have been consciously referring to it for centuries.

One of the things it offers is the opportunity of limits. (In fact, one classic reference book on the subject is entitled The Power of Limits.)

Clearly, all design projects are contained within a whole array of practical constraints - however, even with this being the case, the number of potential variations is very high, and the more complex a project is the more likely you are to end up somewhere near countless.

In purely abstract terms, there will be a datum, which will to a certain extent be fixed by the nature and purpose of the project. But from that datum a myriad of other potential measurements flow; some will be very much constrained by their relationship to others, and all will be related to each other in some way - but the potential for variation, even within a relatively modest project, can be utterly enormous.

Phi offers a really useful tool when the potential to be swamped by possibilities threatens to overrun a project. It's also quite adaptable - whenever I hit an issue I find reference to the magic numbers tends to sort it out.
 
Cochise said:
Three beautiful examples. The only hideous Mustang is the awful Mk 2, which nearly destroyed the band. Oh and the one my wife had. But she replaced it with a 4 litre Jeep Wrangler Sahara so that was OK.

I've met a surprising number of lead guitarists that stick up for the Telecaster - I'd have thought the Strat beat it hands down in all respects, but what do I know? I'm only a bassist.
Click to expand...

The strat is undoubtedly curvier/sexier & has never been bettered for design imo, plus great sound. What guitarists love about the tele is not shape but tone. It can go from mellow to piercing. Just about the most versatile electric guitar going.
 
l love a good knife. To me, the most beautiful example l’ve seen is the Randall Model 1-7 fighting knife:

model-1_03.png


There’s something about those proportions, those curves, those grind lines, that just announces - though this is a decades-old design - that it was done right the first time.

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
l love a good knife. To me, the most beautiful example l’ve seen is the Randall Model 1-7 fighting knife:

model-1_03.png


There’s something about those proportions, those curves, those grind lines, that just announces - though this is a decades-old design - that it was done right the first time.

maximus otter
Click to expand...
Leather handle? Nice.
 
Just putting in a good word for the Dean Single locomotive mentioned in post #3. A Matchbox version was made in the 1960s for no discernable reason, (no tender, no carriages to pull, no track to run it on) but it looked good.
y14a_1.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top