Ever had a crazy idea for an illustration or poster that seemed so new to you that you were scared that your audience wouldn’t get it either? If you’re an experienced designer you probably know what works and what doesn’t. But part of a designer’s trade is venturing out of “what works” territory, and thinking outside the box.
Well, luckily, there’s a set of guidelines that the nice, slick-haired psychologists from Nazi-era Germany have given us, which tell us how to make the viewer see things that aren’t there. If there was a Bible for designers, these would probably be on the front page in convenient list form. We’re talking about the commandments of Gestalt Theory.
To quote Kurt Koffka, the originator of Gestalt Psychology – “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. This can be quickly illustrated by many logos of some brands we interact with every day.
Image from Unilever Singapore
Copyright Hero Motocorp Ltd. Image Sourced from Kikkidu
These images are made up of elements that somehow, get injected with more meaning than they inherently have within the time they get from our eyes to our consciousness. The Unilever logo has an assortment of shapes symbolising the company’s operating principles, which come together in an unmistakable ‘U’. And the logo for Hero, for the most part, evokes a solid three-dimensional ‘H’.
So what is this voodoo? What ingredients do we need to trick people into seeing what we want them to see without an actual image of it?
We’re born into this world without knowledge and an understanding of nothing. The brain’s most remarkable ability is putting two and two together. Visually, this equates to combinations of basic elements, like black stripes on an orange background instantly reminding of a tiger.
We can exploit this mechanism of guesswork based on past experience, that human minds engage in constantly, by understanding how we make sense of everything we see around us.
Every object we see has an outline or a silhouette that separates it from its surroundings. Aside from individual things, we also see groups of things, like sugar spilt on the table or the line of ants that immediately crops up to consume it. Once the ants get to the sugar though, we wouldn’t confuse any of them with a sugar granule. So everything we see either is defined by its outline or how we group things together.
Outline
Figure-Ground
The outline serves to separate an object from the background, and make it appear as whatever is inside the object outline is in the foreground.
If both the object and the background have little detail in the areas they denote and become difficult to distinguish, we associate the smaller area with the object.
We also tend to associate an outwardly curved, convex outline with an object.
The background can be made to appear like an object by enclosing it in a convex outline created by the object, and by integrating small details, giving rise to the illusion of two objects one on another.
Image by Phoebe Morris
Created by Olly Moss. Image sourced from Art-Itch.
Closure
Even when there is no complete outline, our brain can connect a discontinuous outline together and around an imagined object. This way, a representation of an image can be created by only partially separating it from the background.
Image by laut von leise from Ads of the World
Grouping
Similarity
We see objects that look the same as part of the same group. Even if they are separated, mostly identical elements are seen in continuation of a larger entity. Amongst similarly shaped groups of objects, we group together those with the same colour.
The corollary of this principle also holds true, in a series of similar objects, we automatically focus on the dissimilar one. Like looking at Lady Gaga in a meat dress amidst a lineup of forgettable pop stars.
Or like the vertically challenged latecomer Ringo Starr, both qualities of his made more obvious on the cover of With the Beatles through awkward positioning.
Image sourced from The Beatles
Image by Faried Omarah
Closeness
When objects are very close together, closer than their own individual widths, we don’t view them as individual elements and instead see them as patterns above the larger object they appear to be a part of.
Image by leiris202 published under CC BY-NC 2.0
Continuity
Our eyes have the natural tendency to follow along a prominent line and be guided by swooping shapes in a frame. This principle can be utilized to guide the eyes along whatever direction you want by continuing to give the eyes something to follow, once they have started, even in unconventional ways.
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Image is copyright of Island Records Ltd.
Image by Galanis Ioannis sourced from Typograhical Posters
Symmetry
We tend to club together symmetrical objects as parts of the same whole. This natural tendency to look for symmetrical elements in an image is so strong that it even overrides other Gestalt principles. Even if two parts of a symmetrical whole are far apart, with each in proximity to some other object, we cannot unsee the symmetrical pair. They feel like they belong together, and suggesting otherwise will trigger our OCD-rage mode.
Image sourced from Pink Floyd
Although seemingly simple in nature, it is the interplay of this handful of aesthetic principles that command how your viewers will perceive any visual art. So when you’re working on a project and your ‘designer sense’ starts tingling, you’ll be able to pinpoint what’s keeping you from achieving the balance you want, by looking for violations of Gestalt Theory.
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This article was written by Mickey Thibault. If you want to contact him for feedback, send him an e-mail.