Lecture 7 Reflections: Figure Ground and Gestalt Principles of Visual Communication

I have always been fascinated by MC Escher’s works of visual illusions. So this week, I’m very glad that the lecture covered his pieces, and how he made use of Gestalt’s principles in the process of creating his intriguing designs.

According to the lecture, Gestalt is the psychological term that means ‘unified whole’ (surprising, it is not named after the psychologists/researchers who came up with the idea. I had foolishly assumed at first that there must be someone named Gestalt. Ha!). In essence, it is a collection of theories that attempts to describe how people perceive and interpret images even when they lack meaning, because of how they tend to organise information and visual elements into groups or unified whole or groups. To be honest, even though I have visited the Science Centre so many times in the past, I had no idea the workings behind the illusionary phenomena I was witnessing, such as the Rubin Vase, were all attributed to Gestalt’s Principles.

The fundamental principles of Gestalt perception is the law of the pragnaz, which is that we tend to organise our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetric and simple. The 5 laws of pragnaz are

• Figure and Ground
• Proximity
• Similarity
• Continuity
• Closure

The other key properties of Gestalt’s Principles are

• Emergence
• Reification
• Multistability
• and Invariance

Retrieved from: Design School (2015). Image Retrieved: https://designschool.canva.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/041-tb-1324x0.jpg

To better test the efficacy of my learning/reinforce what I have learnt during the lecture, I have gathered some images online which I will be applying knowledge of the Gestalt Principles on.

This poster of a Wine and Food Festival in Melbourne back in 2007 makes great use of Similarity (allowing us to make out the prongs of the fork by mentally grouping the similar wine bottles together) and Figure-Ground – the eye is able to easily figure out the wine bottles from the white surrounding area, and the fork from the black surrounding area. In fact, when talking about figure-ground in this example it can get a bit confusing because there isn’t a fixed figure or ground, when we look at the wine bottles in isolation the fork becomes the ground, whereas when we focus on the fork it becomes the figure and the black background (including the wine bottles) becomes the ground. I think this can be attributed to another Gestalt property of Multistability, where we swing back and forth between the  two alternative interpretations of the fork and the wine bottle. In fact, on closer look a second time, I think the white-coloured portion may even be interpreted as a larger wine bottle containing the smaller black bottles, instead of a fork. Talk about an ingenious design!

Retrieved from: Design School (2015) Image Retrieved: https://designschool.canva.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/051-tb-1324x0.jpg

In a similar vein, this poster from the movie, Peter and the Wolf, makes good use of the Gestalt principles of Figure-Ground and Multistability too, as we pop back and forth between the image of the wolf and silhouette of the boy.

Retrieved from: Design School (2015). Image Retrieved: http://www.92pixels.com/60-beautiful-and-modern-poster-designs-for-inspiration/

This poster from Santa Monica Legitimate Wear employs Proximity in communicating across the image of a deer. Because of proximity and to a certain degree Similarity, we are able to perceive each of the vertical bar to combine and form the single image of the deer. I think Closure might be at work here too, because even though the shape of the deer is not ‘complete’ (there is no distinct outline around the periphery, our mind is able to complete the shape as enough visual cues are present.

From this exercise, I realised that Gestalt Principles are in fact everywhere around us, and not just in the Science Centre’s exhibitions on MC Escher and the Rubin Vase (laughs). Also, it is interesting to note that our brain compensates for the lack of visual cues by grouping elements together and overcompensating for missing elements – perhaps that is not applicable to just images, but words as well. I recall reading a research in the past that when words were jumbled up leaving only the first and last alphabet intact, the human mind is still able to comprehend the word with no difficulty. It is indeed a psychological perspective we can delve further into to make our visual communication more robust.