Tangenting

Again, not something I learned today, but within the last few weeks: “tangenting”. I read about this in the wonderful Looking At Picture Books Substack, discussing one of my (and Wilhelmina’s) favorites, Goodnight Moon:

Tangenting is something you get yelled at for when you’re in art/design school. The theory is that the edges of things shouldn’t touch closely. You should instead look for large overlaps, so the different objects or elements are clearly divided — if they’re too close it feels badly planned, and harder to tell where one thing ends and the other begins, so they say. Clement Hurd… was SUPER into tangenting.

The whole thing is worth a read, if only for the tangenting discussion.