october

week seven

gestalt principles of visual comm

This week, we take a look at the Gestalt Principles of Visual Communication. Gestalt is a term used by Psychology, which means "unified whole". It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. Some concepts include SIMILARITY / CONTINUATION / CLOSURE / PROXIMITY / FIGURE & GROUND.

SIMILARITY refers to how we group images that are look the same together, and they come together to create an image, as compared to when they do not look like each other. When you look at the eagle, you tend to group the eagle together with the triangular sun shape because the bottom of the eagle head as a similar shape as the triangles. They come together to become one image! However, when one image stands out from all the similar images because it looks different, it is known as an anomaly, and is used as a technique to draw the viewer's attention to this certain anomaly.

http://ayreskcaa.weebly.com/home-page1.html

http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/
process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm

Next, we take a look at CONTINUITY. Our eyes will always try to move through a flowing object even though there may be breaks in the image. For example in the following image, our eyes naturally follow the curve to see the maple leaf at the end!

https://taylors2ddjean.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/w4-gestalt-psychology/

CLOSURE is the way our brain chooses to complete an image even though it is broken or incomplete, as demonstrated by the picture below. The box is clearly not drawn in complete lines, but we still see it in the negative spaces of the black circle. This is also utilised in my header for every week, where the white box is completed though it is not lined.

http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/
process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm

PROXIMITY is the way our mind groups images together if they are placed close together. Just like these 4 orange boxes below, if they are placed in an irregular and far arrangement, they do not look like one entity. However, when they are placed near each other, it looks like one image - a square cut into 4.

FIGURE/GROUND is the concept of using differentiating the figure and ground to make out an image. As exemplified by the following image, you can clearly see the gorilla and the lion in the negative space (ground), and the tree in the positive space (figure).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pittsburgh_Zoo_%26_PPG_Aquarium_logo.svg

The assignment this week was to create a paper cut or stencil cut. I chose a photo of Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys, and started off by tracing his image on tracing paper. This photo was a challenge to turn into a stencil cut because of the extensive shading and details, hence I had to simplify the image. I felt it was a lot easier because I had previously been exposed to just tracing lines from Week 4's LINE tutorial. I traced the parts that had some sort of shadow around it, and ended up with the image on the right.

After tracing, I transferred this pencil work onto a white card stock, and filled in the parts I wanted to cut out in black marker. In this case, as it was troublesome to colour it entirely, I used lines instead. After discussion with Professor Flude, I decided to cut out the white parts of the photo instead of the black, as I would lose a lot of the details if I cut out the black parts such as the eye, as I forgot to leave islands. Hence, after cutting the white portions, this is what I ended up with on the right!

assignment

week
eight

visual principles

This week, we take a look at the Gestalt Principles of Visual Communication. Gestalt is a term used by Psychology, which means "unified whole". It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. Some concepts include SIMILARITY / CONTINUATION / CLOSURE / PROXIMITY / FIGURE & GROUND.

SIMILARITY refers to how we group images that are look the same together, and they come together to create an image, as compared to when they do not look like each other. When you look at the eagle, you tend to group the eagle together with the triangular sun shape because the bottom of the eagle head as a similar shape as the triangles. They come together to become one image! However, when one image stands out from all the similar images because it looks different, it is known as an anomaly, and is used as a technique to draw the viewer's attention to this certain anomaly.