Chart Guides

The Five Types

Type is the first and most load-bearing piece of your chart — it describes how your energy is built to engage with the world.

Authority

Authority is your decision-making compass — the part of your design built to know what's right for you before your mind gets involved. It follows a strict hierarchy: whichever authority is defined highest on this list overrides the ones below it.

Centers

Nine centers make up the bodygraph, each governing a theme — identity, will, communication, intuition, and more. A center is either defined (colored in, a consistent part of how you operate) or open (undefined, where you take in and amplify energy from others). Open centers aren't weaknesses — they're often where the deepest wisdom gets built, once you stop trying to be consistent there.

Profile

Your Profile (written as two numbers, like 5/1 or 3/5) describes the role you're here to play and the lens you see life through — part conscious, part unconscious. There are twelve profile combinations in total, each carrying its own theme of how you learn and how you're seen.

Gates

Every Gate corresponds to one of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, and sits on one of the nine Centers. A Gate becomes personally significant once a planet activates it in your chart — conscious (Personality) or unconscious (Design) — and matters even more when its partner gate, on the opposite end of a channel, is also activated, locking in a defined Channel and Center. Below is a working reference for what each Gate is fundamentally about — a starting vocabulary, not the full depth of any one gate (each also carries 6 lines worth exploring once you know your own chart).

To use this table: find the gate numbers on your chart (shown as, e.g., "Sun 34.2" — gate 34, line 2), look up the keynote here for a first read, then note whether it's on your Personality (conscious) or Design (unconscious) side — conscious gates describe traits you recognize in yourself; unconscious gates describe traits others usually see first.

The Nodes

The Nodes are one of the most commonly misread parts of a chart, because the terminology overlaps with astrology. In Human Design, the Lunar Nodes serve a distinct role.

What they're not: your life purpose — that's the job of your Incarnation Cross, built from your Sun and Earth gate activations, forming the vertical axis of your chart's theme.

What they are: the horizontal axis — describing the environment and people your design is oriented toward encountering, not what you're meant to do, but where and with whom you're meant to do it.

Every chart carries two Node pairs — Conscious (Personality) Nodes calculated at birth, and Unconscious (Design) Nodes calculated at the design moment (roughly 88 days prior). Read together, the four Node gates sketch the "who and where" of your path, while your Incarnation Cross sketches the "why." Because Nodes are calculated the same way Gates are, the table above applies directly — look up your North and South Node gate numbers and read them through this "environment I'm meant to grow into" lens.