I went to the Scattered Leaves exhibit while in Saskatoon. I was impressed by the beauty of these manuscript leaves, something the website illustrations do not show clearly enough. I was interested too in the use of negative space in these manuscripts; even although vellum was valuable the aesthetics of page design mean that the majority of a page is left empty. In this image at the right I have illustrated the idea of page design according to the Golden Ratio where the text would be placed in the larger rectangle with the spiral (see the example in image 30 of the exhibit).
In designing for the web we have returned to the idea of illumination: we seem to want pages that have colour and pictures (even those not associated with the content) instead of having just plain text on an plain page.
The page that seems to come closest to a design for the web might be this annotated page from the Book of John which surrounds the main text with glosses and commentary. It seems odd that in designing for the web we want clutter even although our screen space is much less valuable than vellum.
