51–261 Project 2 ⋅ Gestalt Principles

Qiyun Chen - September 9th, 2020

Sketches for 51–261 Project 2

1. ORDER

Description:

Order — the organized, patterns, even, familiar, expected, continued, equilibrium.

For order, I made sketches that reflect the above words, reflecting items and patterns that are commonly seen, easily predictable, or to some degree symmetrical.

2. TENSION

Description:

Tension — combat, unstable, pressure, stress, randomness, crammed, intense, motion, irregularity, imbalance, unknown.

For tension, I tend to think about more combating parties, whether it’s the one square itself with the border or between squares. Emphasizing conflict/contrasting ideas is another thing that I want to show.

For example, the bottom left sketch intends to show a regular and known route strictly surrounded by solid black squares, forming the visual of a route with one and only way to go from top-left to bottom right, whereas the outside shows two irregularly and randomly positioned boxes outside the strict route, maximizing their contrast.

3. CONGESTION

Description:

Congestion––crowded, squashed, imbalanced, surrounded, excess.

For congestion, my main focus is on creating a bottleneck or a target of attention in the sketches to create the feeling of being stuck or hitting blocks.

4. PLAYFULNESS

Description:

Playfulness––unexpected, chaotic, unexpected, happy, fun, particles.

For playfulness, I think about the crashes between different sizes of squares. Playing around with the distribution of whitespaces also adds in motion and tendency to the sketches. I also did a sketch based off the inspiration of hide-and-seek by revealing very little black squares.

5. COMFORT

Description:

Comfort–––corner, surrounded, curves, protected, warmth, depth.

For comfort, I focused on creating an atmosphere of corner and protection by sketching tilted squares around the corner. In addition, I added stableness by drafting stable squares at the bottom of the sketches parallel with the ones up above.