ds to
invention: not by any means as substitutes for it. One cannot give any
recipe for designing, and no rules, principles, or methods can supply
the place of imagination and fancy. "He who would bring back health from
the Indies," says an old proverb, "must take it out with him."

At the same time the imagination can be enfeebled by starvation and
neglect. It can be depressed by dull and sordid surroundings. It is apt
to grow, like other living things, by what it feeds on, and is stronger
for exercise and development.

[Illustration (f027): Use of Controlling Boundaries in Designing
Sprays]

[Memory]

Memory, too, is an important and serviceable thing in designing, and
this, again, can be cultivated to an almost unlimited extent. I mean
that selective kind of memory which, by constant and close observation,
extracts and stores up the essential serviceable kind of facts for the
designer: facts of form, of structure, of movement of figures,
expressive lines, momentary or transitory effects of colour--all those
rare and precious visual moments which will not wait, and which happen
unexpectedly. They should be captured like rare butterflies and
carefully stored in the mind's museum of suggestions, as well as, as far
as is possible, pinned down in the hieroglyphics of the note-book.

[Evolution in Design]

As regards procedure in working out a design, one generally thinks of
some leading feature, some central mass or form or curve--of a figure or
a flower, say--and one thinks of its capacity in repeat; and, since one
form or line should inevitably suggest or necessitate--as by a kind of
logic--another, one adds other forms until the design is complete. For
it must never be forgotten that design is a growth which has its own
stages of evolution in the mind, answering to the evolution of the
living forms of nature--first the blade, then the ear, after that the
full corn in the ear.

Experience teaches us that the most harmonious arrangements of form and
line are those in which the leading lines and forms through all sorts of
variations, continually recur. We cannot place a number of sharply
contrasting and contradictory forms together in design satisfactorily--
at least we cannot do so without recourse to other elements to harmonize
and to bring them into relation. For instance, we might get a great d