TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · The Brief · AGE 17—20 · POSITIONAL · METHOD
What must remain visible together
The frame is set from the drawing's argument, and the crop is made from it.
When to use
Before you generate any drawing-type image — a section, an elevation, a street, a plan — and before you crop one for a platform.
The method
Start from the drawing's job, not its type. Ask what must remain visible together for the drawing to make its argument. A section through a long terrace, where the point is the continuity of the ground line, may need 3:1. A section through an atrium, where the point is the stack of air rising through six floors, may need 2:3. A façade may be long, square or tall depending on the building. Write the answer as a sentence: "the reader must see the ground line and both end walls in one view." Then set the aspect ratio as a slot in the brief to match that sentence — not the tool's default square. Generate at that proportion. If a platform later wants a square, crop a copy and keep the framed one as the record.
Watch for this
Two errors, opposite in direction. Accepting the default because it is the default: most tools open at a square or a 16:9, which is the shape of a feed, not of an argument. And assuming a drawing type has a shape: "a section is wide" is false — a tower section is tall, a transverse section through a narrow house is nearly square. The proportion belongs to what this drawing must show, not to the word "section".
The Lab's note
A method, not a law. Platforms have real constraints, and a square crop for a carousel is sometimes the right call. Our claim is narrower: the frame is set from the drawing's argument, that version is the record, and the crop is made from it, never the other way round. Others teach "design for the platform first"; we think that order loses the drawing.
Try it
Take one drawing you are making and write the sentence: what must be seen together. Generate it once at the tool's default and once at the proportion the sentence asks for. Put them side by side and list what the default cost: which rooms, which ground line, which end of the argument.
Prove it
Defend a drawing's proportion in crit from what it had to show, with the default-shaped version beside it for comparison.
How it works
A drawing is read by moving through it, and the frame decides what the eye can hold at once. A long ground line read in one sweep makes one argument; the same ground line cut into a square and scrolled makes a different, weaker one. A tall atrium section works the same way in the other direction. For years image tools forced drawings into social-media formats, because those were the shapes their training images came in. Aspect ratio is now a slot you can set in most tools. That makes a drawing's shape your decision again, and leaving it to the default is still a decision.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.