Assignment 6 - Gestalt Principles

Assignment 6, like most of the rest felt (I think), was a breather as compared to the other assignments. However, Gestalt Principles were not.

The assignment goes like this:

Theme: Design analysis (PowerPoint presentation)

–group project (group of 2)

–
select one good and one bad (in your opinion) design (e.g. poster, magazine advertisement or information brochure)

–
analyze both designs and build a case to support your opinion.

–
analysis should be based on visual principles (visual form, visual harmony, colour and gestalt principles)

Hence, the assignment required us to create a powerpoint presentation. Together with my group mate, Eugene Timothy Poh, we sourced out 2 posters that were in contrast to one another. Its a classic case of the Good v.s. the Ugly.

These are our presentation slides:














As you can see, we thoroughly analyzed the two posters side by side with Gestalt Principles, for example Figure and Ground. From this assignment, we have understood these concepts taught by Mr Reddy during lecture better. After all, with practice comes perfection. :)

Classroom Activity : Gestalt Principles

In this classroom activity, we are supposed to come up with 3 different designs to demonstrate the gestalt principles. We were given 20 minutes to come up with these 3 concepts, which incorporates the shapes of a square, triangle and circle.

This is the assignment in detail:

Gestalt principles: (20 minutes)

–Create 3 images to demonstrate any 3 gestalt principles.

Procedure:

–Create 3 simple shapes (e.g.. Circle, square and triangle)

–Using these 3 shapes try to demonstrate any 3 principles of gestalt.

–You may repeat, scale and change colour of the shapes

With this assignment in mind, my friends and I sat down to discuss what the assignment meant. As such, the process of experimentation occurred. I decided to draw upon the concepts of Figure and Ground, Proximity and Continuity. This was what I experimented with:



After much experimentation, I decided to draw these concepts.

This concept on Proximity. As you can see from the roughs earlier I didn't want to add the black triangles inside. However, I thought that it would explain the idea of proximity better in this context.



The concept of continuity. Yes I know its a little cheap, however I felt that this concept shows a continuous flow, through direction and movement from inside to outside, or vice versa.

And the concept of Figure and Ground, with the different symbols within one another. The ground here would be the triangle, and the figure would be the square. And then the square is the figure to the circle. As you can see, the circle is blue in colour, which sets it apart from the "ground". In any case, the colour is also different in the square, and also in the triangle.

By drawing these concepts, it was initially difficult to grasp the concept of Gestalt Principles. It was after much discussion with my friends that helped me to draw the concepts out. With their constructive comments, it made the class activity easier to handle.