Visual Design Visual Design Objectives Gestalt Principles Creating - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Visual Design Visual Design Objectives Gestalt Principles Creating - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Visual Design Visual Design Objectives Gestalt Principles Creating Organization and Structure Typography UI Visual Design Objectives What are the goals of an effective interface? Information communication 1. - enforce desired relationships
UI Visual Design Objectives
Visual Design 2
What are the goals of an effective interface?
1.
Information communication
- enforce desired relationships between UI elements
- make all valid actions discoverable and clear
- provide consistent, meaningful, timely feedback
2.
Aesthetics
- well designed, complete, well ordered, professional, attractive
- appealing and pleasant to use
3.
“Brand”
- recognizable as being part of your organization
UI Visual Design Problem
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- Goal: present elements of your interface to your users
- Those users need to know:
- What can I do in this interface?
- Where is ________ ?
- How can I do ________ ?
- What is related to what?
- Want to impose as little thinking as possible on your users
- Let them concentrate on their task, not the interface.
- Ideally, they should unconsciously see patterns and relationships
that help them navigate the interface.
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Organization and Structure
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- Structure doesn’t usually occur naturally, it must be designed
- People will look for structure, even if none was intended
- Use Gestalt principles to create the desired organization and structure
- Impose your structure on users, instead of making them figure it out
(or worse, having them guess incorrectly)
Gestalt Principles
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- Theories of visual perception that
describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes, when certain principles are applied.
- Clues about how the brain groups raw
visual input.
- By designing these principles, we can
build structures that align with people’s expectations – easier for them to work with. Proximity Similarity Continuity Closure Connectedness
(pronunciation: http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=gestalt)
Proximity
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- Individual elements are associated more strongly with nearby
elements than with those further away
Make real separation!
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Similarity
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- Elements associated more strongly when they share basic visual
characteristics, such as:
- Shape, Size, Color, Texture, Orientation
colour > size > type
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Continuity
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- Elements arranged in a straight line or a smooth curve are perceived
as being more related
- bias to continuous forms rather than disconnected segments
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Closure
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- The visual system perceives a set of individual elements as a single,
recognizable pattern, rather than individual elements.
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Connectedness
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- Elements connected to one another by uniform visual properties are
perceived to be more related than elements that are not connected
- Two typical strategies:
- connecting lines
- connecting regions
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Creating Organization and Structure
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We can define visual design principles that leverage these gestalt principles:
1.
Grouping
2.
Hierarchy
3.
Relationship
4.
Balance
5.
Simplicity
6.
Clarity
Grouping (uses Similarity, Closure, Connectedness)
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- Group elements into higher order units
- e.g. Newspapers have paragraphs, columns, sections, pages
- Use the Gestalt principles to create groups
- Reserve powerful techniques such as similarity (e.g. colour) and
connectedness for explicitly telling the user something
Hierarchy (uses Proximity, Connectedness, Continuity)
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- Visual hierarchy guides and
allows information scanning
- create the hierarchy to support
intended reading sequence
- Useful techniques for creating
hierarchy:
- Proximity (e.g. position, white
space)
- Similiarity (e.g. size, spacing,
colour)
Relationship (uses Similarity, Proximity, Connectedness, Continuity)
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- Establish relationships between elements by using position, size,
value (colour, shape, etc.)
- Use position, size, value (colour, shape, etc.)
- Alignment and similarity effective for creating relationships
Balance (uses Continuity)
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- Try to create a stable composition by balancing elements
(similar to physical balance)
- Stability achieved by manipulating properties such as:
- Position, Size, Hue, Form
- Symmetric layouts often achieve balance
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Simplicity
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- Present the minimum amount of information to achieve maximum
effect
- Functions are quickly recognized and understood
- Less information means less time to process
- Can more quickly produce correct mental models
- Simplicity also aids recall
- Less to remember, easier to recall
What are the Essential Features?
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How to achieve simplicity?
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- Reduce, reduce, reduce
- Reduce some more
- Reduce until it hurts
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Typography
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- The practice of arranging written content.
- Difference between “Typeface” and “Font”
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
The quick brown fox
Visual Design
https://www.aiga.org/theyre-not-fonts/
Type Styles and Anatomy
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- Style (Sans-Serif, Serif, Display, etc)
- Weight (e.g. bold)
- Emphasis (e.g. italic)
- Point: 0.351mm = 1/72” (mostly)
- original Mac was 72 DPI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Metal_type.svg
face point size body
Visual Design
https://medium.com/nightingale/choosing-a-font-for-your- data-visualization-2ed37afea637
Terminology
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kerning
Comic Sans
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- Comic Sans is weighted in a way that
looks uneven. Look at the knee of the letter n, compared to Helvetica.
- It also skews characters, which
makes them look unbalanced.
- Finally, kerning is
inconsistent.
https://designforhackers.com/blog/comic-sans-hate/
Comic Sans was developed by Microsoft in the 90s for informal, display text (meant to mimic speaking “bubbles” from comic strips). It’s universally hated. Why?!
Rules of Thumb
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- Avoid using display typefaces in
- Avoid comic sans
- Don’t use many typefaces
- Avoid underlining (use bold and
italics for emphasis)
- Avoid fully justified text
Visual Design
Why Visual Design? Impact
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- Good visual design can reduce human processing time
- Tullis redesigned logging information screens (1984)
- 5.5 vs. 3.2 sec avg search times