To better understand how people might get confused... Imagine a room 9 feet <insert your favorite unit of measure> long and fans 2 feet in diameter. If you put them with bases equally spaced—3 feet apart—you get a gap 2 feet between the wall and fans… but 1 foot spaced apart in the middle.
Naively, you move each fan a half foot closer to the wall. This makes the gap 1.5 feet to the wall but now 2 feet between each other. (You might find ways to argue that this looks better visually than the true answer below, and that depends on a lot of perception-altering factors including how low the fan hangs from the ceiling, amount/ratio of space available, the distance from the non-perpendicular walls, and light sources as they might cast shadows with different sized gaps on the ceiling.)
You need to take the total room length and subtract the fan diameters, then divide that by 3. (So, 5 / 3 = 1.667 or 1'8" from wall to blade tip.) Thus, each base should be 2.667 feet from its nearest wall. This makes a gap 1'8" between each blade tip:
Bringing this around to the theme of web design, this is akin to space-between, space-around, and space-evenly in justify-content[1] (except there isn't a "space the center of each element evenly" selection, except maybe stretch or nesting everything in another flexbox)
Naively, you move each fan a half foot closer to the wall. This makes the gap 1.5 feet to the wall but now 2 feet between each other. (You might find ways to argue that this looks better visually than the true answer below, and that depends on a lot of perception-altering factors including how low the fan hangs from the ceiling, amount/ratio of space available, the distance from the non-perpendicular walls, and light sources as they might cast shadows with different sized gaps on the ceiling.)
You need to take the total room length and subtract the fan diameters, then divide that by 3. (So, 5 / 3 = 1.667 or 1'8" from wall to blade tip.) Thus, each base should be 2.667 feet from its nearest wall. This makes a gap 1'8" between each blade tip:
20" space, 24" blades, 20" space, 24" blades, 20" space = 108" (9 ft) room length
Bringing this around to the theme of web design, this is akin to space-between, space-around, and space-evenly in justify-content[1] (except there isn't a "space the center of each element evenly" selection, except maybe stretch or nesting everything in another flexbox)
[1] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/#aa-j...