Then work to strengthen that alternative view, while weakening the original. Find a way to get them to see an alternative. One will tend to be your dominant perception and the longer you go without begin able to see the other, the harder it will be to see that other perception.įrom a design perspective if you want to change someone’s perception, don’t try to change it all at once. Instead you bounce back and forth quickly between the two stable alternatives. The image can be seen as either two faces in profile or as a vase. An example from below in the section of figure/ground is one you’ve likely seen before. Some objects can be perceived in more than one way. Multi-stability is the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to move unstably back and forth between alternative interpretations. Multi-stability (The Mind Seeks To Avoid Uncertainty) You can see examples of this a little further down under the principle of closure. We can leave out parts of the outline as long as we provide enough of it to allow for a close enough pattern match. Reification suggests that we don’t need to present the complete outline in order of viewers to see it. Instead we find a near match and then fill in the gaps of what we think we should see. As we attempt to match what we see to the familiar patterns we have stored in memory, there isn’t always an exact match. Reification is an aspect of perception in which the object as perceived contains more spatial information than what is actually present. A simple well defined object will communicate more quickly than a detailed object with a hard to recognize contour. When designing, keep in mind that people will identify elements first by their general form. Only after the whole emerges through this outline pattern matching, do we start to identify the parts that make up the whole. We then match this outline pattern against shapes and objects we already know to find a match. When attempting to identify an object, we first seek to identify its outline. Emergence (The Whole Is Identified Before The Parts)Įmergence is the process of forming complex patterns from simple rules. There are several key ideas behind gestalt and gestalt therapy. We see the whole as more than the sum of the parts, and even when the parts are entirely separate entities, we’ll look to group them as some whole. When human beings see a group of objects, we perceive their entirety before we see the individual objects. The quote above is gestalt in a nutshell. The Key Ideas Behind Gestalt Theory “The whole is other than the sum of the parts.” In upcoming posts, I’ll point out which gestalt principles influence the aspects of design being discussed, and I’ll offer more practical uses and examples of how the gestalt principles are used in Web design. In this post, I’ll walk you through a little bit of theory and offer some basic definitions of gestalt principles.įuture posts in this series will consider aspects of design like space, balance and visual hierarchy. It begins with these principles of gestalt, because many of the design principles we follow arise out of gestalt theory. This is the start of a series of posts about design principles. These principles sit at the heart of nearly everything we do graphically as designers. This observation led to a set of descriptive principles about how we visually perceive objects. To the observer, it appears as if a single light moves around the marquee, traveling from bulb to bulb, when in reality it’s a series of bulbs turning on and off and the lights don’t move it all. It was similar to how the lights encircling a movie theater marquee flash on and off. In 1910, psychologist Max Wertheimer had an insight when he observed a series of lights flashing on and off at a railroad crossing. Hopefully, the content covered here isn’t too obvious and self-explanatory, but it’s always great to have a nice quick refresher every now and again, isn’t it? This article is part of a new series about design principles that can serve both as a refresher for seasoned designers and reference for newcomers to the industry. They describe how everyone visually perceives objects. They sit at the foundation of everything we do visually as designers. Gestalt principles are important to understand.
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