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Figure and ground

Lesson 13 of 27 in Composition and layout.

Figure/Ground: Gestalt Principle for User Interface Design · NNgroup

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Figure-ground organisation en.wikipedia.org is how the eye splits a scene into an object and the field behind it, and it is one of the first perceptual skills a baby develops. Black type on white paper is the everyday case: the words are figure, the sheet is ground. The Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin described the mechanism in his doctoral thesis of 1915, and the vase that is also two faces en.wikipedia.org is the demonstration everybody has seen.

The same shape read as object or as background.

A poster in red, black and off-white. A sharp red triangle drives in from the left into a large white circle set against a black field. Cyrillic lettering across the sheet reads Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, and small red and white bars are scattered through both the white and black areas. — El Lissitzky's 1919 poster in which a red wedge drives into a white circle. The shapes carry the whole message: one force breaking into another.Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. El Lissitzky, 1919.Wikimedia Commons/Public domain

A black and white long-tailed bird stands on a rock at the water's edge against a plain gold-brown sky, with a scatter of small birds in the far distance. The painting is set into a wide gold-flecked border of pink, orange and violet flowers, with lines of Persian script in the margins. — A bird painted for the Shah Jahan Album, set inside a wide border of flowers. The plain sky behind it makes the bird the figure and the rest the ground.Spotted Forktail, folio from the Shah Jahan Album. Painting attributed to Abu'l Hasan; calligraphy by Mir Ali Haravi. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access/CC0 1.0

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Question 1, locked
A logo reads as two things at once depending on what you take as the background. What is that?
- Figure and ground
- A modular grid
- Optical alignment
Question 2, locked
Which of these words means this? “The part of a picture read as an object.”
- Saccade
- Type area
- Reading time
- Figure
Question 3, locked
Which of these words means this? “The part read as the field behind the object. It takes no shape of its own while it is being read that way.”
- Ground
- Dynamic symmetry
- Ma
- Hierarchy

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