April 4, 2005

The Law of Proximity

This article, on the Gestalt principle of form perception, is fantastic. [Mads Soegaard] takes a close look at the “gestalt laws of perceptual organization”, and even uses them in this article nicely. (In particular he uses the Law of Promiximity very well.)

Basically what this article is about is how people parse information. Jeff Veen touches on this with his ‘blink’ phenomenon. It all revolves around how people perceives parts of an object and form whole objects, or out ability to parse meaning out of the ‘vapor of nuance’.

The laws are thus: The Law of Proximity, The Law of Similarity, The Law of Prägnanz (figure-ground), The Law of Symmetry and The Law of Closure. I find the Law of Proximity, Similarity the ones most applicable to online design. But they all have their uses, and are really good tools to have in your toolkit.

I really dig this article, and I really encourage you to go and read it. Especially if you design anything for online consumption.

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Tagged As HCI, Info Architecture, Interaction Design, Reference, UI Design

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