After Escher: Gulf Sky and Water
Art by Bob Staake on the cover of this week's New Yorker.
| Tagged with: | Ecology, Gestalt Effect, Stuff We Like |
| Tagged with: | Ecology, Gestalt Effect, Stuff We Like |
Marlboro is a sponsor of the Ferrari Formula One team, but European laws prohibit cigarette advertising -- so what to do?
This barcode-looking thing is an ingenious design. It's not explicitly the Marlboro brand, but at a subconscious level -- particularly at high speeds -- it gets the point across.
As of last month, the design was removed due to complaints. But it's still an interesting case of design ethics, this subliminal non-advertisement.
| Tagged with: | Advertising, Design Ethics, Gestalt Effect, Graphic Design |
Database marketing firm Drake Direct claims that Facebook represents 1 in 4 pageviews in the US. By comparison, Google gets 1 in 12 pageviews using the same dataset.
The data sounds questionable, but it made me think. These days, I probably visit Facebook at least as much as Google. I wonder how that traffic breaks down in terms of Facebook applications vs. socializing? How much of those numbers are games, for instance?
| Tagged with: | Art, Data, Facebook, Four Design Links, Gestalt Effect, Google, Humor, Infoviz, Literature, Memes, Nostalgia, Optical Illusions, Video, Web Design |
This first piece is Rob Price’s iconic Grandfather Clock, wherein a sectional – yet functional— slice evokes the whole grandfather clock.
In a similar vein (no pun intended), I found this Dexter-branded “dismembered flatware” on the same website. A different kind of reductionism, but evocative, to be sure. I appreciate the detail of Dexter’s signature hypodermic needle puncture on each piece.

| Tagged with: | Dexter, Gestalt Effect, Minimalism, Product Design, Rob Price |
I love Target commercials. I have never been able to figure out why exactly, but I find them utterly charming and classy.
I can tell you what I do know: They have great music and production values. Helvetica titles. Modelesque multicultural actors. You never see a price, store interior, or employee-- they emphasize brands: those of products, designers, and Target itself.
The formula seems simple and innocent enough, yet it forms a gestalt that my lizard brain finds irresistible. Suddenly I’m pushing around a red shopping cart full of limited edition designer sheets, a case of Gatorade, and a giant decorator wall clock.
I know what triggers this behavior, so I am careful to watch for the signs. Hence, I was quick to notice when the latest Target commercial seemed to mark a change in tactics.
| Tagged with: | Advertising, Branding, Design Ethics, Environmentalism, Gestalt Effect, Target, TV Commercials, Wal-Mart, YouTube |
If you're keeping up with the design-blogosphere, you've probably already seen that the British Royal Mint recently revealed their new coinage.
The young gentleman responsible for these designs (which were chosen from a public contest) is Matthew Dent, who says this:
I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It's easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.
I've always thought that being charged to design currency would be an interesting design project. It certainly seems as if it would be incredibly high-stakes: as if literally everyone would have an opinion, as if this moment of design would really count. But would it?
| Tagged with: | Ambient Design, Design, Fun, Gestalt Effect, iPod, Money, Profiles, Puzzles |
In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses.
Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome. (The middle face here is the product of 14 criminals.) Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive.
Back in September, 2006, a paper published in the journal Psychological Science proposed a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy for the brain to process.
"The principle finding is that you like a pattern to the extent that you classify the pattern fast," the study's author and psychologist at the University of California, San Diego Piotr Winkielman said.
On the one hand, this is pretty old-hat to anybody in the design business, and particularly anyone in the interface design business (web or otherwise).
We all learned in UI 101 that (a) a good operative definition of "usability" is that a user doesn't have to think about how to do what she's going to do, (b) that one of the best ways we can accomplish this is give them interface elements that they've already learned how to use.
On the other hand, the Gestalt Laws of Prägnanz provide us with some formal figurations that explain why our brains like puzzles.
Just as doing a bit of physical exercise, mental exercise is not only helpful to us in the long run, but can provide an "adrenaline-rush".
So, obviously our designs should be created to take advantage of our user's perceptual fluency both positively (providing familiar UI components) and negatively (using Gestalt and other techniques to provide users with the endorphin-rush of solving a simple visual puzzle).
The really interesting question is whether you can do both of these things at once in a way that preserves the value of each. Now that's a design problem.
| Tagged with: | Apple, Faces, Figure-Ground, Gestalt Effect, Logo Design, Perceptual Fluency, Puzzles, UI, User Interface |
I was over at a friend's house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo's extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:
These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It's branded fun.
| Tagged with: | Apple, Brand Design, Branding, Facebook, Fun, Gestalt Effect, More is More, Nintendo, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Usability, User Experience, Video Games, Wii, Zingermans |