The other constraint is that A0 sheets are one square metre in area. This leads to the neat formula for page sizes in metres being pow(2,(+ or -)1/4 - n/2) where n is the number of the sheet size. It's rounded to the nearest mm.
Discussion here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html
It's embarrassing but not too surprising that Vignelli confuses root 2 with phi. The culture of design and also architecture places a lot of importance on having things "just so" and much less importance on the reason why. It's an "uncertainty avoidance" thing, to use Hofstede's terms.
It's not uncommon to hear strange claims about exact proportions in the human body from architects, which is part of the same attitude.
It's embarrassing but not too surprising that Vignelli confuses root 2 with phi. The culture of design and also architecture places a lot of importance on having things "just so" and much less importance on the reason why. It's an "uncertainty avoidance" thing, to use Hofstede's terms. It's not uncommon to hear strange claims about exact proportions in the human body from architects, which is part of the same attitude.
There's a recent book of investigations of phi by graphic artists that is slightly more rigorous: http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numbe...