Unity

Gestalt theory was mentioned in the class as an important theory for designers to understand, because this theory helps designers to predict how the viewers comprehend a design. Gestalt is a Germany word for “form”, and "unified whole," and is also used in visual psychology of how our minds seek unity. According to the book Design Basic, they define unity as “a congruity or agreement exists among the element s in a design.” And how we look for unity is to understand the concept of perception as a process of pattern making, and self-organizing.

When we look at an image, our brain will seek out the unity naturally, such as the picture above that was shown in class and can be perceived as two different images. When professor Housefield first asked what can we see from the picture, I saw a duck, but then realized the image could also be seen as a rabbit. Regardless if we saw a rabbit or a duck, these two images cannot be seen at the same moment since our brain tends to find unity. 

Unity is always one of the main principles to apply in designing process, because it can assist viewer in understanding more about the design by pulling all the elements together. Take the famous children’s character Hello Kitty as another example. In this character, there are ears, eyes, nose, whiskers and a red ribbon, but no mouth. However, because of the unity, self-organizing, it is enough information for our eye to complete the shape, which is a cat, though it does not have a mouth. Unity help viewer to receive message correctly, thus it is essential for designers to understand unity and how unity works.