Design 101 | Form | Composition | Leading the Eye
Gestalt Principles
Gestalt, German for form, Is a term applied to a school of psychological thought founded in 1912.
Emphasized the importance of studying entire patterns of behavior rather than isolated mutual phenomena. The idea arose from experiments in perception, which showed that perception of form does not depend on seeing individual elements making up the form but tends to grasp the form in its entirety.
Gestalt's basic premise is that organization is central to all mental activity and is a reflection of how the brain functions. Using Gestalt, the whole is understood to be different from the sum of its parts.
Four Aspects of Gestalt
The four aspects of Gestalt are Closure, Proximity, Continuance and Similarity. Individually or collectively, these aspects help us understand form as a meaningful whole and not as isolated, unrelated parts.
1. CLOSURE
Closure describes the human tendency to interpret visual stimuli as complete, closed figures, even when some of the necessary contour information is absent. To the mind surrounded from early childhood with building blocks, doors, books these lines immediately represent a square.
Example 1 | What do we see? We see a square rather than 4 lines. The eye does not see them as unrelated, but insists upon CLOSURE.
2. Proximity
Proximity refers to the distance between the parts comprising a form.
Example 2, the elements that are closer together appear to be related.
Example 3, The eye organizes the dots into 4 vertical columns rather than horizontal rows because of their proximity to each other.
3. Continuance
Continuance occurs when part of a form overlaps itself or an adjacent form. Your eye is led to follow the dominant form across a secondary without interruption. It describes the preference for continuous, unbroken contours with the simplest possible physical explanation, rather than more complex but equally plausible combinations of more irregular figures.
Example 4 | 5 circles combined create an unbroken, continuous contour.
Similarity
Similarity among parts in a form helps hold the form together and can be an effective way to create meaning. In Example 5, elements similar in size appear to be related. In Example 6, similarity is different than repetition in that the forms vary slightly.
The principle of Similarity shows that elements will be associated more strongly when they share basic visual characteristics, such as the visual variables of shape, size, color, texture, value and orientation. Now this figure (Example 3) appears as two groups of two columns each.
Example 5 Elements similar in size appear to be related.
Example 6 | Similarity is different than repetition in that the forms vary slightly.
Example 3 | Appears as two groups of two columns each
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