Using Gestalt principles in visual branding

Using Gestalt principles in visual branding

Both business owners and marketers alike should understand the way people perceive and translate design. It is important when it comes to designing the brand’s visual identity. Through a proper understanding of the way people perceive visual objects and their arrangement, can businesses create coherent and robust visual branding that connects with the audience.

Is it important? Yes, it is: industry experts explain that the human brain typically processes almost 11 million bits of information each second and transmits the same information at almost 200 miles an hour. No doubt it has quite a monumental processing power. Utilizing that to make visual branding effective does require work.

The process usually happens unconsciously

The human brain would typically consume a huge amount of energy if it were conscious of such neural activity. Hence, to conserve energy and work at maximum efficiency, the human brain must use both conditional probability and inductive reasoning.

Scientific observations have led to the creation of Gestalt principles of design. This briefly tells the way the human mind organizes and perceives visual information.

This post will explore briefly the Gestalt design principles. Practical applications will also be examined briefly to help logo designers and their team create a logo, create branding, and other designs that are authentic, captivating, thoughtful, and unforgettable in visual terms.

A brief history of Gestalt principles

Who is Gestalt? What is Gestalt? And in fact, why is Gestalt? In all honesty, Gestalt is not a personality. He neither existed nor did he have a role to play.

The Gestalt principles were developed by three German psychologists, namely Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, and Wolfgang Kohler. The principles were developed between the 1910s and 1920s. 

Each of those psychologists was interested in understanding how humans extract important information and perceptions from haphazard stimuli. Humans have an innate desire to seek order when things are haywire.

Where did the term ‘Gestalt’ originate?

The term ‘Gestalt’ originated from the German words for pattern, shape, and structure. It basically means a reference to the complete appearance of something greater than the total sum of its parts. Gestalt in psychology refers to the principles enabling people to perceive things virtually in order.

Understanding the Gestalt Theory of Perception

According to the Gestalt theory of perception, the human brain can interpret information about relationships and hierarchy, especially in designs and images. It does so through visual cues like closure, proximity, and similarity. 

The Gestalt principles provide a psychological framework for understanding how the human brain perceives and organizes visual information. Here are some critical concepts worth examining:

• Emergence suggest that to understand an object’s complete form, its parts need to be understood first.

• Invariance suggests people still can identify similar forms irrespective of color, scale, weight, or differences in rotation.

• Reification posits that the eye and the mind fill in gaps and forms even in the absence of explicit details. Professionals of logo design Dubai explain that this concept helps negative space create images and shapes from gaps present (that form white space).

• The figure-ground organization is of the belief that the eye organizes most forms in 3D. It also separates their parts into both the background and the foreground. The human eye can still perceive the background (even if the foreground is flat). Each thing surrounding the main subject is perceived as the background by the human eye.

• Multistability suggests that the human eye will perceive all forms simultaneously whenever a doubtful form can be translated in more than one method. Additionally, in the presence of many stability options, the eye will go back and forth between different interpretations. It happens a lot in optical illusions.

• Previous experience indicates that a form’s interpretation is subject to influences of the individual subject's personal experiences or collective cultural experiences of the audience.

How will this benefit the goal of making a brand that is successful and sustainable? The answer lies in the usage of Gestalt Principles

Gestalt principles can be used to help designers stay informed and make the right decisions in branding and design. That can help turn each element of the branding, marketing, and web design into an effective visual communication tool (logo design cost). Eight Gestalt Principles can be used to make communication and visual branding more effective:

• Closure.

• Continuity.

• Multi-stability.

• Proximity.

• Simplicity.

• Similarity.

• Synchrony (aka common fate).

• Symmetry.