This reading is a great teaching tool for those wanting to get into web design/ have to create a page for a client. Yes, we want our pages to stand out and be different from the rest. But if it’s too cluttered and confusing, the viewer won’t know where to focus or how to navigate the site at all. You need to have a nice clean presentation in order for even a child to navigate through with no problem, finding what they want in a flash. And that’s what Gestalt principles provide: laws and principles on how to organize a web design. Here are some of the term included in these sets of principles:
Figure Ground Relationship: Elements are perceived as either figures (distinct element of focus) or ground (the background or landscape on which figure rest)
Uniform Connectedness: elements that share uniform visual characteristics are perceived as being more related than elements with disparate visual characteristics.
Common Fate: Humans tend to perceive element moving in the same direction as being more related than elements that are stationary of that move in different directions
They may seem wordy and confusing, but by looking at some examples of today’s most popular websites, it’s quite easy to see how it’s done.
YouTube: The page is has the logo on top right corner and if your eye continues towards the middle, you see the search bar (Common Fate); same thing when you look at the left of the page and see your subscriptions as you look down. In the middle of the page, your subscriptions are separated by the icon of the channel you are subscribed to; along with a little line that separates each channel (Uniform Connectedness). The strongest aspect (to me at least) is that the video images and icons stand out of the white background (Figure Ground Relationship). With taking in account these terms, YouTube has created a site that is easy to use to find everything you need in terms of web content.
Facebook: Looking at the top left, you see your profile picture and name. Looking down the left, you see the groups for Favorites, Pages, Groups, etc (Common Fate). The words in dark blue are highlighted as names of the Facebook users and the simple black refers to text/ status updates users post on the site (Uniform Connectedness). And Again, the colored images and words stand out from the plain white background (Figure Ground Relationship), making the site easy to navigate and one of the reasons it is one of the most popular sites in the world.
So as you can see, it’s not that hard to understand why these laws need to be used. With Construction and “architecture” in a way, a website becomes easy to viewers to use, so they will want to use it more often. It is quite essential to learns these principles, otherwise your site will just fall flat. Learn the Gestalt Principles of Perception! You’ll be thankful later.