Create STRONG Design & Layouts with Gestalt Theory!

1. Class Introduction: Have you ever played the game when you look up at the clouds and you try to find people, animals, or things, your brain is always subconsciously finding patterns, shapes, and meaning to everything you look at to try to make sense of the world. This is the basic foundation of Gestalt theory, which stems from Gestalt psychology, a theory thought that originated in Germany in the early 20th century. We will review some of the laws associated with each stalled psychology and talk about how it relates to design. When we understand how the human brain processes and categorizes a series of elements. We can use that understanding to help us craft easy to digest visual messages. Each adult theory is really just trying to explain how we visualize and organize information. Organizing this information is the very core of what we do as graphic designers. So there's several different principles or laws within each stoke theory. And we're gonna go over these seven today. Similarity, proximity, symmetry and order, simplicity, closure, continuation, and the law of experience. After taking this class, you'll be very comfortable identifying several Gestalt principles. We'll be able to get a chance to look at tons of real-world examples. You'll even be tasked with a student project that allows you to discover these design principles in the wild. My name is Lindsay Marsh and teaching design theory is my jam. I'd been a graphic designer for over 20 years and a design instructor to over 350,000 graphic design students. I'm excited to be able to bring this class to you today. I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Similarity, Proximity & Simplicity : Let's first start with similarity. Our brains like to group objects together regardless of where they are placed. In this case, we group these circles based on color, not by location. The human brain loves to categorize things. When you look at the following random assortment of squares and triangles, what do you see better yet? How do you see them? There is likely a chance your brain is deciding to group together the triangles, like in this example. Or it has decided to group the squares together, like in this example, your brain is working hard to make sense of the different shapes presented. The principle of similarity also applies to color, texture, shape, position, orientation, and size. And knowing how the brain works here comes in handy as a designer, we can use this principle to shape how we develop our layouts. We can bring attention to the most important elements in the design by making it different than the rest. We could do that by making it a different color. Like this example. We have two layouts. Each shape represents a photo, text or element in the layout. We are using similar shapes in our layout. This helps everything feel like it belongs together. This example features different shapes of photos and content, which does not allow the brain to categorize all the different information presented, it causing confusion. The next principle we're going to go over as the principle of proximity. Close objects are grouped together. Your car console uses the idea of proximity to make it easier for you to find and locate related controls on the dashboard. You may notice all of the air conditioning and heat are dials located in close proximity to each other. You may also see the radio controls put tightly together in relation to the other unrelated controls of the car. This is a helpful concept to keep in mind when doing layout design. We can group related items and the layout together so they feel like a larger, cohesive group that share a similar goal. This helps the human brain organized larger amounts of information that would otherwise be overwhelming. And the logo above, the logo on the top is a good example of the principle of proximity and action. The logo on the top has the words of the company travel and loop spaced rather closely together. I'm able to read this logo as one company name travel loop. In the logo in the middle, you see a wider gap between the two words and they start to read a separate words, but also start to feel disconnected from each other. The event name and the descriptor line are grouped together in the same area. You can also see related date and location items grouped close together. This allows the viewer to group related items together so they can easily understand the information. Imagine if we placed all the information into one area without any sort of separation. It can be really messy and intimidating for the viewer to look at. The next principle is the principle of simplicity. And we break down elements and to the simplest forms possible. We see the image on top is one complex shape with curves and lines. Instead, what our brains tried to do is break that complex image down into something easier to handle. And we suddenly see three simple shapes. Instead of just one complex shape. We see the principle of simplicity applied to Icon design. All the time. Icons need to be seen and very small sizes. If we were to have a detailed illustration for a small icon, it would not always be easy to tell what it was. We instead simplified illustrations down to icons that could be identified in many different sizes. So when you take this icon, e.g. when reduced down to smaller sizes, this simplified icon fares much better than the more complex illustration. One thing to always ask yourself when creating a design is can I make this more simple? You could do this by reducing unnecessary elements, graphics, and even combining texts that are saying the same thing. Simplification can make your message appear more clean and concise. Ask yourself another question. Is this graphic or element adding value to my design? As designers, we typically feel we need to show up for creativity. But remember, your designs overall message is always the most important. Make it clear, concise, and rewarding to look at. So take this example. The layout to the left is busy and complex with many different sized elements and structures. Simplifying our layout to focus on our main photo idea or focal point, can help a viewer cut through the noise, so to speak. To have an enjoyable experience. Using simplicity makes complex objects easier to understand. The goal is to reduce it down to the point where it's still retains its core meaning and use this clock is still understood as a clock, even though it's just a circle. And one bit line. 3. Figure & Ground, Closure & Continuation: The next Gestalt principle we're gonna go over is figure and ground. We instantly try to figure out what's in the background and what is in the foreground. This is very important for our brains to process quickly. And it goes back to our hunter-gatherer days. We needed to quickly determine what the animal we were hunting and what was in the background. This could be tough if you're looking for a brown lizard and a sea of brown sand, our brain looks at color and contrast differently to find and assign objects as either either in the foreground or in the background. This principle is evident with the classic Rubin's vase experiment. Look at figure a. What do you see? Do you see a vase first or two faces? What if we switch the colors? Are you now able to see both? Among darker colors, lighter colors tend to stand out more as foreground are elements in the front. This is true with this example. The bright orange vase really stands out compared to the darker purple faces. The opposite is true for this one. In this example, if we have a website landing page, we have a pop-up box where a user can sign up for a newsletter. You can help the viewer better maintain the focal point, the most important item by darkening all the unrelated items. This darkened area now becomes the background and the lighter, higher contrast areas become the foreground. Without giving the user cues to help determine the foreground or the background, it can make a viewer lose focus on what is the most important part of the design at any given time. Now it's time to talk about symmetry and order. And your mind tries to achieve balanced and establish order with everything it sees. What do you see when you look at this graphic? In reality, they're just six brackets, three facing to the left and three facing to the right. But when you place the left and right brackets together, the mind naturally tends to seek completion. In this case, making the form of a rectangle. When we talk about balance and design, we're mostly talking about symmetry and order at work. In this graphic, we have two uneven triangles. When we make them the same shape and put them together, it achieves a natural symmetrical balance. And looking at this example, there's a much better chance that the two symmetrical halves on the left will be grouped together as one unit and our mind as opposed to the asymmetrical parts to the right. This logo for a sushi restaurant features letter of equal width on both the left and the right side of the logo. When you put both letters together on the left, but do not balance it out on the other side. The logo looks really lopsided and unbalanced and it feels unnatural. You will see magazine covers use the same tactic, making sure to balance the article titles on both the left and the right sides instead of listing all of them down one side. This helps to achieve balance. The principle of closure. We like to fill in the gaps. Take a look at the square and the circle below. Even though they have gaps in their strokes, we have no problems filling in the rest of the shape. To complete it. The circle could just be two curved lines, but we still like to see it as a complete circle in our brains. In this series of shapes, what do you see? In reality? There are four pies with one slice missing from its shape. What our minds like to do is fill in the gaps and view this as four circles and square because it's the simplest explanation. A practical use of principle of closure and Design is the use of negative space and logo design. Below is a classic example of how our brains fill in negative space. We fill in the open space between the E and the T to form the letter a. The letter a is not anywhere in the active positive space, but only exists in the negative space that exists between the positive spaces. The same is true for the 0 that is formed by the shapes created by the positive space of the T and the M. The shape below looks like two opposing arrows, but in fact it forms a D for direction. The law of experience. We use past experiences to try to interpret new ones. If you're reading this, then you've learned how to identify each character in the English alphabet. The letter a can be presented to us without its distinct center crossbar. And it's still view to us as the letter a. Somehow. We are assuming it is a letter a based on our past knowledge with how the letter a is formed. Remember our example of finding animals, people and objects and clouds. The only reason we were able to do this through our past experience of observing the world around us. We have certain expectations when we view or interact with the design. For instance, when we are on a website and we want to know if a link is clickable. We know from our past experience that underlined words typically tend to be active links. If the text is not underlined, sometimes it's bolder or has a different contrasting color used for the text. If we decide to make our active links on our website dramatically different than what's expected by the viewer. We're, it's confusing them and confusing the viewer. The same rule applies to lay out design. Based on past experiences, we typically see company contact information at the bottom of an advertisement. Then doing otherwise would seem really strange. Have you ever seen fine print of an ad at the top? That would seem extremely odd and not in sync with our expectations from past experiences. With magazine articles we are expected to read from the left to the right page, not start from the right and right to the left. And this would just be an English. There are languages that do the opposite. But what is really interesting is that we can use this principle of experience to do something unpredictable to bring more attention to our design. It could be adjusting our main headline topography go up and down instead of the predictable going left to right. This could cause viewers to stop for a moment and pay attention to something that is unexpected. The principle of continuation, we prefer to follow smooth, curved paths over inconsistent rigid ones. And the example here, you see two intersecting lines. According to the principle of continuation, your brain will continue to follow smooth, curved lines even if there is a separation or another intersecting line. In this case, your eye follows the black line all the way past where the green line intersects. Following a smooth path. Your eye usually does not tend to fall with the black line, then veer off in a dramatic tangent like you see here. Rather it continues on a smooth direct path regardless of the color change. In this example, you see two intersecting paths. You will most likely follow either the green or the black path all the way through until completion. We can use this principle of continuity to act as our signposts along the road to guide your viewers eyes toward the desired message. A very simple illustration. This is displayed in a magazine spread below. The model is glancing toward the top right of the page, guiding the user to the next page with the advertising headline. Once again, the viewer site is pulled downward toward the photo to the product of the chair. If we were to tweak this slightly and have the model's eyes looking in the opposite direction. The natural smooth flow of the sign would be broken. 4. Reviewing Strong Gestalt Examples : So these principles are really need to understand on a theoretical level. But let's start looking at some real-world designs to see some of these laws and principles and action of Gestalt theory. So you should all principles are great guides to follow as designers. And we're going to review several print advertisements, logos, movie posters, and other projects you might see in the wild. We can study how multiple principles are at work in strong design. This logo, you'll notice the law of continuation used to guide the viewer's eyes from the top of the F down through the rest of the word to the tip of the leg and the K. You'll also notice the law of symmetry in order used to balance the left and the right sides with equal weight in the extended tails. The tails, you see at the end of the k and at the F. And this logo design example, if you look long enough, you'll start to see the letters S and R and abbreviation for the company name, Silk Road, that also forms the chassis of the bicycle. The law of experience allows us to see both of the letters, but also discern the shape of the bicycle tube because we've seen the same bicycle shape many times in our lifetime. And this logo example, simplicity is at play here. We read this word as the full word, happy, even though there is a curved line that is substituted for the age. The law of experience also indicates that this slightly curved line represents a smile, which then makes the word have intended meaning of happy. For this logo closure allows us to see the a shape created from the safety pin. There is no crossbar in the a, but we still are able to see this as the letter a. For this logo. What seems to be a random, messy accident of shapes ends up representing a cloud. Our brains are marvelous at locating everyday objects. And a pile of goo. Gish dealt principles never age. That's why it's so important to really study these. Here we encounter a series of advertisements, mostly from the 1960s and the 1970s. And it proves that classic design and layout never gets old. This is largely because the way our brain organizes and handles information doesn't change. This advertisement for Jaguar from 1964 represents a time in advertising or subtle messages spoke louder than large headlines. It was an understated approach and was unique, new way to present products. Figure and ground principle is applied here with a dark black color, creating an obvious background. While the car and the white text functions as the foreground. This high contrast helps the product, the car, to be the main focus of the ad. The law of simplicity graces itself with a headline that focuses all of its attention with its small size and clear background. It is simple, clean, organized, and makes me feel good when I look at it. The Ford Pinto may have been an awful car, but the advertisement does work well to draw your attention through the use of continuation. The striped lines run throughout the entire ad, directing the focus first on the headline, then to the cars, and finally down to the final ad copy. Everything has an order. And this law helps to bring that order about through graphics. This tobacco ad, it's an old Russian ad where we see the legs of the gentlemen create letters that spill the word. This 1974 Bell Telephone add. We see the headline use continuation to completely move the viewer's eye from one page to the next with a headline ending with additional ad copy. This car ad from 1973 we reviewed before. We tend to like to group items together with the law of similarity. This ad groups like items by color AT pairs, the red square of information with the red car and the yellow box of information with the yellow car. Because of color, we pair the right car with the right information. Movie posters really have to grab our attention. This one also uses the law of continuation to move you from the movie title all the way down to different characters in the movie. This provides the viewer with an experience that entices them to find out more about the movie and these characters. In this movie poster, which was a creative deviation from the official one, uses the law of symmetry to commit to a balanced focus design with equal weight on the left and right side of the ad. This is a book cover that uses figure and ground, is a two faces. Who are the smoke from the rocket ship? 5. Gestalt Theory in the Bookstore & Beyond: Gestalt examples are everywhere and I love to visit my local bookstore and look at all the book covers and really find out what principles are at play that make these design covers awesome. This book really experiments with figure and ground and that in-between space of trying to figure out what's the foreground and trying to figure out what's the background. And this playfulness, if you will mix it up really, really intriguing book cover. You can tell with the words that are integrated with the subject matter. Sometimes the words are on top and the foreground, and sometimes they're in the background with the bunny rabbit popping out, out of certain letters to almost make it look like it's in the foreground. So this play with the figure and ground, the background and the foreground, it makes for a really, really intriguing book cover. This book cover uses symmetry to create an incredibly strong focal point at the very center of the book with the colorful paints. They also put some very vital texts and the inside of this focal point so that you read the top, get out of your head and then your eye moves toward that center. Symmetrical focal point also uses figure and ground to get your eyes to look at the arrows, but then also invites no pun intended with the title. So you have this interesting back-and-forth between what's foreground and what's background. And it makes for a really interesting book cover that way. There's also the law of continuation here. It has this very strong diagonal. Notice how the arrows are going from the top right to the top left, and the letters are going from the top-left to the top right. So it's kinda got this interesting design tension using these basic law, laws and principles. This book cover uses the law of experience. If you were to just look at the center of this book and not focus at all on anything else is stare at the center of the book, you may see just a collection of different shapes, maybe some that have right angles, maybe some circles. But really when you study this, you can absolutely read this very easily. You can read each letter in each word. Because of our law of experience, we know that these are the very basic shapes of classic English. Characters. Were able to read it, but it also can be abstract. It can almost look like art in a way, and our brains can still make it readable. And this uses the law of continuation because these are two separate books. It's the first book in the series and the second book in the series. And when they're displayed in the store like this, it creates one single face. And I thought that was absolutely incredible and what a great and brilliant idea. This one uses symmetry in order to create a very wonderfully powerful center aligned piece where you have the eyes and the face of the subject matter right there in the center, as well as the topography. And because of this amazing symmetry, you can get away with a little bit more spacing between the title words. Normally you'd want to be able to keep those together to to maintain readability. And that would be the law of proximity. When things are close together, we group them together. But because there's such symmetry with this, we can read the title very easily even though there's spaces, big spaces between the words. We can see the principle of continuation here with all the interconnected lines, everything kind of goes back to that center focal point in the circle. And instead of being all these random circles that are unconnected, you have these lines that allow you to move throughout the whole thing and it draws your eye towards the center. And you'll notice a lot of times you'll see the law of continuation use. I'd probably use that more as an example in design because that is an incredibly powerful tool and you see it very, very frequently and designs. There are times as a designer we want to break these laws and break the rules to create positive design tension. So that means there's tension built up in your design that intrigues the person to want to continue to study it. And this is a wonderful example of that. It breaks all sorts of laws. At breaks the symmetry in order law. There's nothing symmetrical here with the topography. It also breaks the continuation rule. There's no continuity or flow within the topography. It also breaks with proximity. The letters are not together even though it's the title. But I can still read this, take up and read. I'm able to read it, but it takes a couple of seconds, but it makes me want to stop and go. What is this book? What is this design? It's interesting. So there are times where we intentionally and meaningfully break some laws to bring attention and a standout among the crowd. Here's another example to reiterate what I was saying in my last point is this example where you have a really low contrast between the wolf and white van letters and the background lines, which makes it at first kind of hard to see. But it was all very intentional. It's to intrigue you to look at it a few more seconds. It's not super obvious, but it is very, very intriguing. So I picked up this book out of a sea of other very boring books that had normal readable titles. So that's another reason we're okay. How can I break some rules of design to make my book look interesting? You can see a nice figure and ground here where we have this very strong foreground with the black stripe across it. And then you have a higher contrast white background as the background. So you have a nice figure, nice ground balance so that the whole book isn't trying to get your attention using the same color. You have this nice contrast and balance. And a lot of times when I have a design that's looking a little busy and it's got a title. Sometimes they'll put a very dark or light, whatever the higher contrast color is. And put that behind the title to cut the design a little bit. So you're not just looking at one big square, but you kinda have it chopped up in your brain so that there's a little bit of help to help you break down the title away from the background. So here's the law of simplicity. Instead of using complex cooking utensils and putting a real picture of a spatula and all the knife and all these other things. They simplified it into simple icons so that it didn't take away from the very simple words. So the simple icons paired with a simple topography mix, a really clean read. That even though this really strange half circle is between the L and the W, that I read that as an 0, so 35 below. But there's also this interesting action that it takes place as it's sinking down below the other characters and below the baseline. It actually has a sense of it's sinking and of movement. And it makes it really dynamic, even though all they're doing is lowering the circle and cutting it in half. But I think the portrayal of movement here is interesting. In this poster I created dance. It looks like it's, you have the n as the second letter. But because of the law of experience and because the woman is actually dancing, I'm able to put together that this says dance, even though the n and the a look like they could be out of order. I move from the D to the a, then down to the end, then the C and the E. And I'm able to, my brain is able to simultaneously within a second go. Okay, that's dance. There's a woman dancing and the word dance. It can be out of order. You can play around with typography a little bit more because of this law of experience. I was at Starbucks this morning and found this nice array of three different package design for a coffee. And I noticed there's a really strong symmetry in order here. First of all, you have nice figure and ground. You have a nice foreground and a background defined because of high contrast. But there's also this beautiful symmetry in order with the white oval, but also the top and the bottom topography that is also perfectly symmetrical and they end at the same level with the.in the center. So everything is perfectly center aligned and it just really draws my eye there to the name of Coffee is actually a student project that was submitted, featured it on my Instagram because I really enjoyed it. But it has a nice figure and ground, as you can see, there's this background on the top and the bottom. They put this nice blue high contrast box. So you almost, when I look at this, I see this as two digestible halves. I have this top half with the product, and they have this bottom half. And I'm also able to read if this was all and they do this a lot and package design, if it was all just one color or all, just that background that you see at the top throughout the whole thing. I might lose the cookie or I might lose the title or the name of the product. And because she was able to use this nice foreground elements, she was able to break that foreground and the background and make it way more digestible than it normally would be. 6. Student Project: So as you can see, I love finding inspiration by going out, taking pictures of designs that I feel like I connect with and I feel like I have some really good design theory principles at work. So that's gonna be your student project. I want you to go out to the bookstore, to the grocery store where there's package designs and there's wine labels, or anywhere out in the mall, even a banner that's hanging up or a billboard. And I want you to take pictures of things that you feel like have strong design principles, especially ones that exercise Gestalt theory. What I want you to do is almost build a folder of different items. You can even make this a journal if you want. However you wanna do this, but I want you to take each one of the pictures that you take. And I want you to figure out a couple of the laws or principles that are applied. So if there's the law of symmetry for a certain poster design, I want you to make a note of that and go, well, how does it work? Why did this really speak to me? That's what I want you to do. Just go out into the wild and take some pictures and discover some of these principles at work because these principles are about how our brain works. It's about human psychology and how we digest information. So if we understand these laws, then we're gonna be able to understand the human psyche and we'll be able to know how people look at things and how you look. It's a random assortment of letters and shapes and colors and with somehow make sense of that. And how we can unlock that and how we can understand that will make us superior designers because we are not just creating random shapes and letters. Everything has intentionality. And everything is either playing with our brain and a good way or helping our brain digest all this crazy world, all this crazy information. So I hope you got a lot out of this class. I can't wait to see kind of some of your ideas and examples. You could just post it in the student project section. You can just post a few pictures and then just say underneath, what laws are, what principles do you think that design or that picture you took of that design has? Let me know what you think of the class. Leave a review and I can't wait to see your projects and see what you discover as you go out and look at the world in a different way.