CDF(F18) Project 2: Gestalt Composition

Zhuona Ma
Zhuona Ma
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read

1st draft, Sept. 4th

For my paper iteration, I started with interpreting and linking the keywords with real life inspirations.

Rigid: fixed, inflexible, static, unchanging — it reminds me of unattractive objects with repetitions, like chessboard and bricks, so I decide to keep the squares aligned and create complex patterns.

Fluid: flowing, smooth, continuous — I take inspirations from the puddle patterns, pen strokes, and math diagrams. For these five thumbnails, I tried to play with different scales, and see if they add some momentum to the pattern.

Clumsy: bulky, heavy-handed, messy — it would be natural to describe piles of books, randomly-scattered cards and unloaded boxes with clumsy. My favorite part is relating clumsy to “imbalanced objects under gravity” (and I sticked with it through my further iterations).

Elegant: graceful, classic, refined — I need some level of repetitions, complements, and pattern change. For inspirations, I looked for tile compositions.

Rhythmic: musical, balanced — it’s hard to conclude how Rhythmic should be with abstraction, but there are multiple ways to represent it in real life. Typical examples are music visualizations, vector fields, animation patterns, and recursions.

Erratic: unpredictable — This is the most accurate word I could think of to convey the idea of Erratic, which means you first do some regular patterns, then break it with a sudden change. Erratic is not static; it’s a process of creating and breaking.


1st digital iteration, Sept. 6th

In this iteration, I narrowed down to four thumbnails for the chosen word pairs — Clumsy + Elegant, Rhythmic + Erratic. In addition to digitize the compositions, I made some modifications to each of them.

Clumsy + Elegant: For Clumsy, I tried to draw boxes that are “almost falling” or “snapshotted while falling”; for Elegant, I made more repetitions in pattern and experimented a little by rotating/translating the squares to unsymmetrical positions.

Rhythmic + Erratic: For Rhythmic, I increased the number of squares to show more fluidity but didn’t measure the angles perfect so it might not look smooth(something to work on later); for Erratic, I abandoned the random scattered ones and only focus on “building a pattern then breaking it” (I realized some of the thumbnails from last iteration look more of clumsy so I deleted those ones).

*Things to improve: Now every keyword seems to be on its own; there’s no direct deliberate pattern-match or contrast in a word pair.


Intermediate iteration + final solution, Sept.10th

Clumsy + Elegant:

Before generating my final solution, I experimented a little bit with on Clumsy: I manipulated the number of squares, rotation, and contrasts in size, and expanded the patterns to make sure they fully occupy the bounding box. However, it didn’t work out as I expected. Although with these manipulations, both thumbnails did become more visually-appealing; however, the falling boxes(left) look like a bouncing spring, and the tile pattern one(right) looks like kilts. I realized that I shouldn’t sacrifice abstraction for visual appearance.

With that in mind, I went back to my original ideas and refined them with manipulation on proportions and color. For the falling boxes, I imagined the bounding template as walls, so that the largest box is about to fall but stuck between the wall and the smaller boxes; I colored the box at corner in order to emphasize that “this box is the smallest one, but look, it’s holding all that weight”. For Elegant, I exaggerated the proportion between the larger blocks and smaller ones, to give some richness to the content. Also I decide not to rotate it as I did before because I want it to “work in a pair”, that is saying, to complement Clumsy in terms of structure.

Left: intermediate iteration; Right: final iteration

Rhythmic + Erratic:

For Erratic, I first created a 4 by 4 grid pattern; then rotated every component about 6 degrees in different orientation. By now it illustrates Erratic, but not obvious enough. So in addition to these modifications, I took a random square off. So far, it’s illustrative enough, so I keep it as my final version. For Rhythmic, I trie to expand on the idea of vector fields. However, as I drew it out, it looks Erratic(uhhhhh). Although as you stare at it long enough, there seems to be some weird spinning illusion(yeah it’s at least somehow rhythmic), it is too subtle at a first look. Besides, it does not match Erratic in either scale or style. Therefore, I started out from the Erratic thumbnail, trying to do everything the opposite way but at the same time match their scales:

Erratic thumbnail: straight and parallel in whole; rotated component-wise; generally in repetition but not predictable.

Rhythmic thumbnail: rotated to right in whole; straight and parallel component-wise; symmetric; internal scale contrast(so that the pattern looks in motion).

Left: intermediate iteration; Right: final iteration

Figure Ground:

I tried four thumbnails for figure ground, drawing inspirations from maze, camera focus box, photo frame, and abyss.

Final Solution Compilation

Communication Design Fundamentals | Fall 2018

Zhuona Ma

Written by

Zhuona Ma

Communication Design Fundamentals | Fall 2018

An Introduction to Design and Communication

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