Gestalt Principles

To become a good designer, you need to understand and use the power of psychology in visual perception.

How does someone react to your design when sees it?
How does his mind interpret it?

How does one’s mind interpret it?

Gestalt is a psychology movement, that helps us understand and predict these interpretations.

Our brain tries very hard to find sense in visual images.

That’s why it looks for familiar clues in your mental visual library …
It sifts through millions of image impressions until it finds an explanation of what you see.

You’ve got a very powerful computer there, in your head!

Back in 1920s, Gestalt psychologists

Max Wertheimer,

Wolfgang Kohler

and Kurt Koffka

came to conclusion:

“The sum of the whole is greater than its parts”

That means that we see the whole picture before we see details.

According to Gestalt psychology, there are 5 basic principles of visual perception.

According to the principle of similarity – We visually group similar elements

That would be the elements that share similar characteristics, like:

• Value

• Size

• Shape

• Texture

• Color

• Orientation

You see them as a group and separate them from other elements….

Use this principle if you, for example, want to emphasize an element.

Just make it different, and everyone will focus on it.

When we see elements that are randomly spaced out – we see them as separate objects.

Once they get closer, we see them as a group of friends.

We visually group objects that are close.

Elements, that are closer together are seen as belonging together.

You can emphasize an element just by spacing it away.

We move our eyes from one object to another as we would we follow a path…

well… until it is interrupted

Your eye naturally follows…

• a line

• a path

• a group of shapes

• or even lack of…

Your brain likes simplicity, so it always picks the smoothest paths.

These two

Not those.

You can emphasize an element by having other elements point to it.

Which makes sense..

The principle of closure states that we visually finish incomplete shapes.

That means we tend to see the whole shape even when part of the information is missing.

If what we see, only suggests an explanation – the eye will fill in the gaps.


How many shapes do you see?

Your first reaction and a natural one – is 4:

3 black circles, covered by a white triangle.

Seeing these 4 shapes is the simplest interpretation of what you see, not the 3 circles with cut-out slices…

Our brain likes simple solutions.

Our brain separates a foreground from a background on a flat surface

We see an object – figure against its surrounding – ground.

It is also called positive / negative space relationship.

Same shapes can be seen as

• a foreground

• or a background

A Color or a tonal value of an element have nothing to do with determining whether it is a figure or a ground.

It’s all in the context

You can create an interest in your design by working on negative space instead of the object itself…

Or even combining both

Science did not stay still since 1920s

Other principles of perception were identified.

People intuitively prefer the simplest solutions possible.

What shapes do you see here:

One disc and 2 partial discs

or

3 overlapping discs?

Your first impression was probably the 3 overlapping discs – why?>

… not the three complex shapes….

Because the three overlapping disks is the simplest interpretation of what you see.