Gestalt Compositions
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Olivia Keller
This experiment was completed for the Fall 2020 Communication Design Fundamentals course at Carnegie Mellon University. The goal is to become familiar with the fundamentals of design by exploring the Gestalt principles of composition. Compositions are intended to communicate the following feelings: Playfulness, Comfort, Order, Tension, and Congestion. Each composition consists of a 2x2 white canvas and only black squares, although bleeding edges and overlapping shapes are acceptable.
Final Iterations
In my final iteration, I removed some of the stability and balance that was present in my first attempts by creating movement and dissimilarity. I hope to move the viewer from balance to instability and back again. Based on my critiques, I sought to add motion to tension, congestion, and playfulness, removing the foundational squares or symmetry that had been present before. I found myself reducing the number of squares used or applying them in new ways, especially in comfort. The final effect I sought was to zoom into a moment of emotion rather than depicting it as an event.
Experiment Process:
I challenged myself to try sketching with as few squares as possible at the beginning. My goal was to rely on the composition as a whole rather than the individual pieces. Each sketch began with a mind mapping of related words to start thinking about the less literal, what it means to “feel” versus describe these words.
Playfulness
My first playfulness draft evokes action-oriented play, focusing on curvature and interaction through continuity. The bottom four compositions focus on the idea of curvature, rotation, as well as actions. Playfulness translated to jumping, chasing, tackling, and other forms of “play.” This is why I explored the idea of bleeding over edges and “chasing” squares off the page. The topmost design is quite different from the others in that I didn’t want to describe playfulness but rather have the “looker” experience playfulness while interacting with it: this composition depicts a large eye looking to the right.
I iterated compositions that were game-like in nature. Digital illustration emphasized the order and disorder present in each one, especially the effect that similar sized squares have on evoking feeling. Digitizing made it easier for me to visualize continuity. Based on my feedback, I plan to leverage that to see how I might disrupt it in later versions.
Comfort
Roundness and curvature carried from playfulness into comfort. This expanded into leaning or “taking weight” from others, as seen in the top right. The struggle moving forward will be to communicate community rather than isolation from community, maybe using proximity. The current iteration draws too much attention to the empty space between the many and the one. I plan to explore collective comfort (versus comfort of one by many) in the next iteration as well as filling the space more.
When I think of comfort, I think of roundness and encompassing (hugging). In this iteration, I chose to zoom into previous versions or even rotate them, yet still holding onto the stability of the white voids left by the occupation of other spaces.
Order
I wanted to address different aspects of order in each composition, but the overall trend was associating “order” with “pattern.” In these pieces, I decided to increase the use of black squares to achieve continuity with more than three objects. In some designs, the goal was to create an orderly “equal” feeling by repurposing “empty” white space into shapes as well. In others, I focused on grouping to communicate “splitting” and fractals.
I prioritized creating balance between white and black space. I wanted people to bounce between ground and figure, recognizing the orderliness in both. Although sequencing and size gradients were the first idea I had in mind, I wanted to design a “comfortable” order, versus literal order. Balance and continuity were important.
Tension
Both suspense and suspension were key concepts to my understanding of tension. I thought about falling, crushing, and general dooming of a single, focal black square in all compositions except the bottom right. The bottom right composition was meant to cause tension rather than describe it. Humans are satisfied by symmetry, so I wanted to exacerbate the horizontal-vertical illusion. This was meant to frustrate by means of the slight asymmetry of white to black space. Lack of continuity was important to me in this process.
What’s apparent through digitization is that many of my tension compositions could as easily portray order. The affect of balance, similarity, and size is more apparent in the second draft. In my critique, we noticed that there is a theme of stability across all my compositions. I plan to play with dissimilarity and size more so than before in order to create more movement and less symmetry.
Congestion
During this concept, I challenged myself to create with fewer blocks than my initial planning. Congestion relates to piling up, but I wanted to use Gestalt principles that didn’t rely on quantity. I focused on dissimilarity, proximity (to squish or congest), and repurposing the white tile’s borders as a finite container rather than a window.
My experience with congestion was similar to tension; digitization made apparent that many compositions could as easily portray order. The affect of balance, similarity, and size is more apparent in the second draft. I received feedback on the symmetries in these designs and plan to make some of the same changes as I did in tension. We found that my my first design shows how congestion happen rather than evoking a congested feeling, so I also plan to iterate on that aspect.
