The basic details communicated by a grid of identical boxes is so common that the danger in using it is that it doesn’t communicate the information that implementation of the design require without additional visual details: Are these objects clickable? If so, where do they go? Are they database objects, or manually created elements unique to the page? Etc. This is a simple example of similarity that we are accustomed to seeing and using frequently. The objects are variations of the same type of content In a preliminary design, like a wireframe, the above arrangement would communicate several things: I don’t mean underlying grid, but the practice of arranging visible objects in a grid. That’s not an unfair simplification, as long as we recognize that boxes come in many shapes and sizes!Ī common pattern in interaction design contexts is the grid. It’s been said that all web design can be reduced to boxes and arrows. The differences in how text is treated - the breaking of similarity - function as visual language, separately and apart from the meaning of the actual words themselves. This is why typographical systems are so important to scanning a headline’s size, weight, and spacing differentiates it from the paragraphs that follow it, a list’s indentation and segmentation set it apart from surrounding text, and a pull quote stands outside of the overall structure to intentionally signal the importance of a single line extracted from the whole. Visual structure communicates conceptual structure even before a single word is read. Text requires structure - both conceptually and visually. Otherwise, all text would look the same, and, according to the gestalt rule of similarity, be perceived as equal - as peers in a flat system. The most basic rules of typography are, essentially, an information architectural system. I’ve written on this idea before, using a text outline as an example of how the mind looks for simple cues - like indentation and outdentation - to help understand the way information is prioritized on a page. The most basic example of similarity in a web design context is text.Įvery element of the visual language used on a web page is - should be - a reference to the information architecture of the page itself, and of the website as a whole. The second, Closure, explains how the mind is capable of perceiving more information than what is actually visible. The first, Proximity, deals with how the mind perceives groups of things differently based upon how closely they are arranged. This is the third entry in a multi-part series on the gestalt principles of design. These concepts can help to integrate a better understanding of perception into the way we arrange information, so that we can communicate more effectively. The Gestalt Principles of Design are a set of concepts and guidelines drawn from gestalt psychology, which theorizes that the mind tends to process organized groups of things as a whole, rather than a number of individual things. When objects look similar to one another, the mind perceives them as a group or pattern. Gestalt Principles of Design - Similarity
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