Download Episode 33Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.Well we&#39;re in the midst of a discussion on Unity, and as a part of that topic, we&#39;ve taken a detour through what are called the gestalt rules. So, if you&#39;re joining us midstream, let&#39;s recap a few points.Fist of all, Gestalt theory gets its name from a School of thought in Psychology, which began in the early 20th century in Germany. And this school of thought says that, when it comes to studying human behavior, we need see the big picture, we need to discern broader patterns of behavior, not just isolated psychological events. It&#39;s in the big picture that we get our insights.But this concept carries over to visual studies as a way to explain how we can achieve a unified composition out of individual parts. And it even goes beyond that to assert that a unified whole is greater than the sum of its parts.And so far we&#39;ve discussed a couple of gestalt concepts, namely figure-ground and closure, which you can catch up on by downloading those episodes.But moving right along, I&#39;d like to step though some more gestalt rules today, starting with the rule of Similarity. And as we take these one by one, we&#39;ll see that they&#39;re really pretty simple and straightforward. The hardest part might be remembering the terminology.Now, the rule of Similarity, just as you&#39;d expect, says that a composition looks more unified if the elements are similar in some respect. If objects are similar, they look related. Just like people. Identical twins are obviously related to each other. But brothers or sisters that share physical characteristics can also look obviously related. It&#39;s when siblings don&#39;t look much like each other that people express surprise that they&#39;re actually related. They scratch their chin and say, &quot;Really? I just don&#39;t see the family resemblance.&quot; And this is what it&#39;s like in our compositions. As we compose, we can put the same traits in elements if we intend for them to look unified.And those traits can include shape, or size, or color or value. If you&#39;re a media designer, we might include similarity of motion, or any other attribute that will demonstrate similarity. If they look related, people will see them as a pattern or group, and your composition will convey a stronger sense of unity. And, again, its just like how we can intuit a family if we see a group of people that share genetic traits.On the other hand, once we&#39;ve established that pattern, once we&#39;ve got a unified pattern, then we can go on and do more interesting things. We can direct attention to where we want it. If, among a row of black dots, one solitary dot is colored red, then it stands out, and we&#39;ve got a device that will direct attention.  Or if one of those dots is oversized compared to the rest, we&#39;ve got a point of emphasis in an otherwise unifie

Design Guy, Episode 33, All in the Family (Similarity)

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