Simply explained it is a part of psychology that values the whole picture, how the human experiences its surroundings. Gestalt is about seeing things that are not there and the mind interpreting the shapes into something recognizable. It is broken down into four subcategories:
Emergence (seeing the whole before the individual parts)
Reification (mind fills in the gaps)
Multi-stability (mind seeks to avoid uncertainty)
Invariance (recognize similarities and differences)
These are broken down into 9 categories there again.
When we see complex shapes, we tend to recognize them as simple shapes we know, like circles, triangles, and squares, this I called the Law of Prägnanz.
Closure is when we combine parts to form a simpler whole. Our eye fills in the missing information to form the complete figure. Like the brackets we looked at today, we tend to pair them together so that our brain gets a simpler picture, and it is easier to see. The human eye has a soft spot for symmetry and order and it is the same here, the brain wants to have an order so that it is not chaotic. Placement of object can decide whether or not we group thing together. A couple of millimeters can decide how we see elements. The eye also seeks continuation, it is more important that it makes systems where it is consistent than the actual lines. We continue shapes and make them work then if it was not how it was meant to be perceived at first. Connected does also seem more relaxed than a symbol without any relation. The same with elements with a similar shape, they also seem more muted. Gestalt is also about grabbing the attention, this can be done quite elegantly with a chosen focal point. The question if something is the background or the figure is in the foreground. Working with negative space is important within gestalt.
Hasmish Muir quote: “It’s all about the ‘gestalt.’ Means that Armin Hofmann’s logo for the Swiss National Exhibition at Expo Lausanne in 1964, explores and plays with the negative space allowing the eye to find the shapes without it being outlined or obvious. With avoiding to use the end line on the cross it allows the eye to see the ‘e’ and the cross as the space is not dedicated to one or the other, they have to share. With letting the inside of the logo be the same color as the background it creates an airy feel to it, and creates reification. This means that our mind tries to fill inn the gaps, so our mind might close the open gap and create two symbols. This logo has gestalt because you first see the shape before you move in and see the different elements. This is called the emergence. This design is so simple that it is extremely complex. It consists of two symbol that is easily recognizable and therefore we can understand it easier because we can recognize the similarities and the mind wants it to be a known shape. (invariance).
Recap of the day
We started with choosing our words, we chose Hell and Yeah. I found it quite fun. Then we made some rough sketches about how we were going to balance out the letters and choosing a grid 6x7, in that grid we can do all of the letters and have quite a lot of space to play with. Ewan had some great ideas, so we began pacing the post it notes.
The one thing with our choice of letters is that we have a lot of similar letters that could look strange, but we worked with having them a bit different and playing with the placement in the grid. It worked out quite well. We tried with orange, pink and blue post it’s, but was a bit too much, so we switched the orange with a light blue, this way the two blues would be a bit more uniform and a bit more difficult to differentiate the blues.
We laid out all the post it’s the right way first, then we removed and stitched some out for other colors. We played with it till it was a bit more abstract.
We than started with making one animation of the post it’s flipping to a diagonal position. Than another that was like a train going around the letters.
We have now made a time laps of us removing the post it’s. I feel like we did a good job, the end video could be a bit better, but it could be worse. It is abstract enough to be fun in my mind at least.
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