Do You See What I See?

Critique of 16 and Final 4

Well...obviously we are all seeing dots in our sleep after this week.  The critique process was very helpful in fine tuning how to identify each gestalt principle.  The feed back in the beginning was different from the ending.  It took a little time to absorb the 16 frames (I did remove the extra 8.  I forgot how to count to 16 that day!).  At first my group (Cara, Milah, Josh, Ryan, and Lauren) saw lots of negative space with small dots.  After observing for a few minutes they decided that there was some variation in size but still leaned toward the small scale.  They also said the frames were neat in appearance with symmetry and no randomness.  There was a good balance between patterns and lines.

Group pick for final four

It was beneficial to look at the sketch and immediately say the first principle that came to mind.  This identified the strongest principle for each frame.  Some were very difficult to pin down the prominent idea and they came back to it at the end.  If it was ambiguous, they threw it out of contention for the final four.  In the end, they chose the four sketches at left that most clearly expressed closure, similarity, continuance, and proximity.  They also had some very good ideas for improvements on the four they picked.  The question mark for the closure frame needed to be smaller and closer to the right bottom corner to expose more negative space thus reinforcing the principle.  For the similarity and continuance frames the dots needed to be larger giving them more prominence.  I did make an executive decision to change the group pick for similarity.  In looking at the four as a whole, I felt that there was a need for more variation in size than I could incorporate even with enlarging the size of the dots for this particular principle.