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Hack 75. Grasp the Gestalt
We group our visual perceptions together according to the gestalt grouping principles. Knowing these can help your visual information design to sit well with people's expectations. It's a given that we see the world not as isolated parts, but as groups and single objects. Instead of seeing fingers and a palm, we see a hand. We see a wall as a unit rather than seeing the individual bricks. We naturally group things together, trying to make a coherent picture out of all the individual parts. A few fundamental grouping principles can be used to do most of the work, and knowing them will help you design well-organized, visual information yourself. 8.2.1. In ActionAutomatic grouping is such second nature that we really notice only its absence. When the arrangement of parts doesn't sit well with the grouping principles the brain uses, cracks can be seen. Figure 8-1 shows some of these organizational rules coming into play.1 Figure 8-1. Two groups of triangles that point different ways and a middle triangle that can appear to point either way, depending on which group you see it being part of 2You don't see 17 triangles. Instead, you see two groups of eight and one triangle in the middle. Your similarity drive has formed the arrangement into rows and columns of the shapes and put them into two groups: one group points to the bottom left, the other points off to the right. Each group belongs together partly because the triangles are arranged into a pattern (two long rows pointing in a direction) and partly because of proximity (shapes that are closer together are more likely to form a group). The triangle in the middle is a long way from both groups and doesn't fall into the same pattern as either. It's left alone by the brain's grouping principles. You can, however, voluntarily group the lone triangle. By mentally putting it with the left-hand set, it appears to point down and left along with the other triangles. You can make it point right by choosing to see it with the other set. 8.2.2. How It WorksThe rules by which the brain groups similar objects together are called gestalt grouping principles in psychology. Although there's no direct German-to-English translation, "gestalt" means (roughly) "whole." When we understand objects and the relationships between them in a single, coherent pattern rather than as disconnected items, we understand the group as a gestalt. We have a gestalt comprehension of each of the sets of triangles in Figure 8-1, for instance. Four of the most commonly quoted grouping principles are proximity, similarity, closure, and continuation. An example of each is shown in Figure 8-2. Figure 8-2. The four most quoted gestalt grouping principles
When none of these principles apply, it's still possible to mentally group items together. When you put the middle triangle in Figure 8-1 with one group or the other, it picks up the orientation of the group as a whole. It's a voluntary grouping that modifies how you see. Gestalt principles exist in visual processing not because they are always right, but because on average, they are useful. They're good rules of thumb for making sense of the world. It's not that similar things can't be separate; it's more that most of the time they aren't. Although random coincidences can happen, they are vastly outnumbered by meaningful coincidences. The world isn't a mess of disconnected parts, and it's useful to see the connectionsif you're hunting an animal, it makes sense to see it as a single gestalt rather than a paw here and a tail there. 8.2.3. End Notes
8.2.4. See Also
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