WEEK FIVE STARTER POST | Finding Gestalt

If you hang around design nerds enough, you'll start to hear about gestalt theory and the principles of similarity, proximity, continuation, closure, and figure/ground. We’ll be discussing this theory more soon, but take a look a this brief primer article on gestalt to get a better hold on it. Also, you may have astutely noted that I skipped "Week Four" and went straight to "Week Five." That's solely a product of my bad math and not realizing we're in week five since the first week we did not have a blogging assignment


Back to the Gestalt principles, these can be applied to analyze design and show how a particular concept works using them. Whether it's continuation bringing you through a design, closure allowing you to understand the image even if it’s not all there. This set of posters does that well.

In the True Blood promo, you have red – which immediately makes you think of blood, and the silhouettes of two figures, one a vamp.

With Loretta Lynn’s concert poster, notice how the image of a guitar and of Loretta are both there and communicate what that tells you about the type of concert this will be (for those of you who aren’t Loretta fans).

Below you see the principle of similarity at work – we notice both the eraser and the italicized white “I” because they are different from the similar elements grouped around them. This is a powerful tool to help accent your messages when communicating visually.

Assignment: take a look through the definitions in the article linked above or in the glossary of Arnston’s text and find an example in a poster or image design online. Discuss what principles are at work and how they make the design effective or ineffective (if used poorly). Use the principle names as labels for your post to develop a catalog of examples for the class to easily access. Don't forget to label your name too.