Assignment 6: Gestalt Principles - Design Analysis

Exercise:

• group project (group of 2)
• select one good and one bad (in your opinion) design (e.g. poster, magazine advertisement or information brochure)
• analyse both designs and build a case to support your opinion.
• analysis should be based on visual principles (visual forms, visual harmony, colour and gestalt principles)
• Submission: 6 minutes presentation in class

This assignment should be considered the easiest among all our assignments for this module, as we do not need to come out with any new designs but just to find existing designs and comment about it based on the visual principles that we learnt. Perhaps the only challengin part is finding the bad design, since if the design is really bad in the 1st place, it shouldn't be published at all! Lol...

So, I teamed up with my partner Natasha for this assignment. I volunteered to look for the good design while she handled the bad one. We agreed to look for movie posters for both so that it's easier to compare the difference.

It wasn't long when I decided to use one of the movie posters of my all-time favourite movie - Lord of the Rings! It's the poster for the 2nd part of the trilogy: The Two Tower.

http://www.impawards.com/2002/lord_of_the_rings_the_two_towers_ver5.html

Basically, there are 3 main principles that the poster used in the design.

Figure & Ground

• There is a clear contrast between the foreground image and background image. (The man in the most front layer, the 2 ladies behind him, and the background image at the furthest.)

Similar Colour Scheme

• The whole poster used the greyish blue as the main color scheme, hence every element on the poster seems to be part of it, and not seperate items placed together.
• The bright golden yellow color used for the movie title appeared very outstanding as a result of such clear contrast compared with the whole poster.

Symmetry

• Personally, I feel that the main reason why I like this poster and find it good is its usage of symmetry.
• Clearly, we can see 3 layers of symmetry in the poster.
• Firstly, is the man at the centre holding the sword, dividing himself to 2 equal parts which form the symmetry.
• Secondly, is the 2 other ladies which are placed at the same height and depth on both the left & right of the man.
• Lastly, is the background structure of the pillar design, which is symmetrical.
• It's also interesting that the 3 characters in the poster actually tells the viewer a rough story of them, i.e. a typical love triangle between a man and two women.

As for the bad design, we chose the below one. (I should not comment much on it)

http://www.impawards.com/1998/night_at_the_roxbury.html

Can you identify what's bad in this poster? =p

One thing I learnt from this exercise and the visual principles is that it's important to understand that each of the principles are not mutually exclusive, meaning they are all inter-related. One cannot just simply focus his design on one principle without considering the other. And something about movie poster in particular, the design must enable the view to have a rough feel of what the movie is about.