Gestalt Principle

In this lecture, my lecturer, Julian taught us about getalt principle which is very useful for designs. He began with showing as a few pictures and asked us if we could make any sense out of it. Following that, he then explained to us about the difficulties we faced from those pictures and the reason was actually their organisation. It will only be clear to the viewers if the things in the pictures are correctly organised and this is what getalt principle is known as--laws of organisation.

He then went on to talk more about factors in getalt principle. They are figure and ground, proximity, similarity, continuity and closure. Under figure and ground, it is said that the figure is supposed to be smaller and also to have a good contrast with the background.

Whereas for proximity, it is said that things which are closer together will be visualise as if they are in the same group. As for similarity, it says that things which share similar attributes, eg. shape, texture, size, colour will be seen by viewers as belonging together.

A group of figures which is arranged in a way which have direction and seem to continue from each other shows good continuity. This is what the principle of continuity states.

Last but not least, for principle of closure, it helps viewers/readers to see a figure even though some part of the information are missing.

In conclusion, a good use of getalt principle can make a design more organised, unified and also simplified. This allows the readers to understand better. On the other hand, if one apply getalt principle for a design, he can cause the design to be messy, difficult to understand and viewers will not want to take any longer look at it.

At the end of the lecture, there was a classroom exercise. The objective of the exercise was to make us apply getalt principle to 3 images and this posted picture was what I did at that time.