week 9 & 10 class activity

Chang, Dooley and Tuovinen – Gestalt Theory in Visual Screen Design – A new look at an Old Subject

1.       Gestalt theory usually expressed as laws is one of the foundations for instructional screen designs and it is widely used to improve educational screen design consequently leading to effective learning. It has many variants (as many as 114 Helson 1933) of the laws which are closed related if not overlapping. The paper presents literature review of the eleven Gestalt laws applicable to screen design – visual form. These include: Law of Balance/Symmetry (visual object will appear incomplete if not balanced); Law of continuation (the instinct to follow direction derived from visual field); Law of closure (openness in objects or shapes perceived as incomplete visual pattern); Law of figure-ground (change of background/foreground in visual can lead to different perceived objects; Law of focal Point (focal point catches attention); Law of Isomorphic correspondence (images meanings varies as people read them different); Law of Good from; law of proximity; Law of similarity; Law of simplicity; Law of unit/harmony

2.       The above laws are applied to visual design of educational multimedia program. The results after applying the laws to the visual screen design we deemed effective with better usability compare to the first one. The usefulness of the Gestalt visual design principle for learning was highly ranked – therefore deem effective. It recognised as it add value to their learning with less enthusiasm will therefore need further research to leverage support.