Writing
Co-design: Collaborating with people for better outcomes
One of the main tenets of human-centered design is collaboration. Working with diverse groups of multidisciplinary people — those with different life experiences, perspectives, and expertise — can lead to richer solutions that serve the needs of everyone involved.
In a three-part series for Smashing Magazine, I write about the gestalt grouping principles of visual perception, a set of principles that explain how we perceive and organize visual stimuli.
Improve Your Designs with the Principles of Similarity and Proximity
The perceptual process enables us to perceive the world through our senses of sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. In particular, our visual system processes vast amounts of information in its environment. Rather than perceiving elements separately, our brain organizes patterns, objects and shapes into whole forms that we can understand.
Have you ever wondered how elements come together to create successful designs? It’s no accident that compelling design just seems to work. What most of these designs have in common is the use of gestalt grouping principles to organize information that helps us understand the relationships and differences between elements. As designers, we can use these principles to create our own engaging and successful work.
Creating an effective web design is like putting a puzzle together, with the various parts coming together to tame the chaos and form a whole, well-organized design. At the foundation of this organization are the gestalt grouping principles.