Gestalt grabs me in the eye doctor’s office.

I know it’s been a little time since my first post, as Charles Apple commented on in his blog. But it’s been a bit hectic over the past week or so because of my recent career change.

Last week I was sitting in the eye doctor’s office as my daughter was reading off the eye chart. I was scanning the office, basically because I was bored. Things went though my head like, “why does one eye chart use slab-serif type and others use san-serif?” I’m sure people all over have thoughts like these on a daily basis.

Then a brochure about contact lenses called “synergeyes” grabbed my attention. Looking at the logo at first I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was seeing. Was that a brush stroke, or an eyebrow? But there’s no pupil. Intriguing!

This is the principle of closure, where your brain fills in images that aren’t really there. This is a great principle to use when you are creating an identity for an organization because it has the effect, as it did on me, to force the person looking at the image to figure out the images and their meaning. In a world of logos vying for attention this principle can give you a leg up on the competition.

Other principles being used on the logo are proximity, all the letters and the eyebrow being close to one another, creating a unit. Then there is similarity, “synerg” is displayed in a light san serif font and “eyes” are in a bold san serif font. This breaks the two words apart even though all the letters are the same distance apart from one another.

On the brochure, the similarity of the purple color brings your eyes down the design to the logo. This way of directing your eye down the page is the principle of continuation. More on that one another time…