Is everything you thought you knew about Graphic Design a lie?
I'm going to show you the biggest optical illusions that I've found
that will make you question what we actually see.
The first and most common illusion that everyone sees is the letter E.
A lot of people think that if we draw like an exact shape around the letter, E
if we copy it and do it like this, move up that the this should fit and look good.
But the reality is a lot different.
If I change the opacity of these shapes on top of the letter E, you'll notice
that even though these two rectangles are the exact same thickness,
the letter E, the stem at the top, this crossbar is not
in fact this part of the letter is always slightly thinner,
And that's to give the illusion that it's the same thickness.
The second illusion that we see
is whether the arm and the leg of the E, which is the top and bottom part.
These should match up perfectly.
But if we actually draw this shape around it,
make this stroke even thinner, you'll notice if I zoom in up here.
The arm is actually slightly thinner or slightly not as wide.
This is again, to give the illusion that they fit perfectly.
The next illusion in the letter E is this arm here in the middle.
We think it's actually in the middle, but the reality is it's not. In reality,
if I take this and I align it to the center of it, this is where it should be.
Again, this is to give the illusion that it is in the center.
You may have seen the Windows mouse cursor.
Everyone's going crazy over it recently.
And that's because when you draw a line
from the top of the mouse, catch it down and try to keep it straight.
You'll notice that it isn't not symmetrical at all.
In fact,
you start to see that the bottom part of the cursor is at a 45 degree angle.
A lot of people say this is because of computer technology
at the time of the pixel density on the screen
with GUI's, the graphical user interface, and that might have some truth to it.
But also inadvertently, it looks straighter
at smaller scales and it looks like it's sort of lifting itself out of the screen.
This is one of the most popular optical illusions we've seen recently,
One of the most famous lies I think that we've been told by
these shaves is the Google logo.
We seem to think the Google logo is a perfect circle.
Well, I'm going to draw a perfect circle here or an ellipse, and I'm going to try and
match it up perfectly to the Google logo and see what happens.
You'll see that if I try to, it doesn't actually work.
Here is the perfect circle in black.
Here is the Google logo and we see there's a massive void
here to the right us to repeat that circle.
You'll see that it happens again on the way in that
we tried to get it, but it's been balanced ever so slightly.
So it's not a perfect circle.
Now, why does this happen?
It's to make it look one more human.
And if you do it as a perfect circle,
it wouldn't have the optical balancing and it just will look good.
I've got a whole video which I'll link down
below of the Google logo, and it was filled like 5 years ago.
The biggest liar of all shapes and letters is the letter O or anything rounded.
I've got some type here.
This is actually a font that I'm working on
and when I was creating it, you have to notice that I created the x height
and the x height is between this line and this lines.
It's like the bottom and the top of normal lowercase characters.
If you notice very closely, if I zoom out, they look like they're all in line.
It looks like they all finish at the same point,
but it's actually lying to you, circular shapes or circular letter
forms like the Y, the P, the e, o all have something called an overshoot.
The overshoot is
this green line that we see here, and this is the amount of space
that's needed, essentially overshooting is where you take the rounded character
and you scale up slightly to give the illusion like it's on the same line.
This app is called Glyphs, and this is what I use to create fonts
and you can see I've got the x-height, which is this line to this line.
Everything in this is the x-height.
And you'll notice that we have this orange bar at the top.
Now, if a zoom out, you'll notice that all the letterforms look,
even they look like they're
just you can put a straight line and it would flow along it properly.
When we zoom in to the E you'll notice that the E comes right up
towards this orange line.
That is the overshoot
and that is the most common optical illusion or lie that we see.
Another huge lie that we see is in shapes that cross each other.
Like the letter X, I'll use Helvetica for the first example.
You think that is literally two lines crossing, but that isn't true.
If I was to draw a line from the top to the bottom of the X,
like from here to here, you'll see that there's a bit of space.
And the reason for that is because it's optically aligned
and moved to make it look more balanced.
We see with these thin lines more prominently, if I was to take this
and move it exactly where it should be, it wouldn't look right
compared to the real version, because our brains see this illusion of it
being a bit too far up that it doesn't fit the same angle.
So what time designers do is they move this down
to where it's not symmetrical, but it looks symmetrical.
It's lying to us.
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I recently talked about the white effect and this is a huge lie.
So these are two exact copies of my logo and you can see that
the black one looks good,
but the white one on the dark background actually looks like it's glowing a bit.
And you can see that through it looking slightly bigger than it actually is.
So when we have this issue, we have to create basically an inside
stroke around it to make it balanced a look like it's from the original design.
Here's the balanced version.
The other lie is 'The Bone Effect'.
Now what this is, is essentially an illusion that makes a shape,
a circular shape that goes into a straight line look like the humerus bone.
You can see here more prominently, we've got these circular shapes
and then we get this huge sort of straight line.
And the problem is without it being gradiented of like a gradual curve,
it kind of looks like it's poking out or even more inward instead of balanced.
So the best way for me to explain this
quickly is by creating a stroke like this that is rounded.
You can see that this line here is pretty crazy.
So what we have to do is mitigate that.
And the easiest way I found in a lot of circumstances
is to just use the width tool and bring it out slightly.
And you'll notice that the gradient has gone.
It's slightly more bulged, but it looks a lot cleaner and better
than simply having this amount of bone effect happening.
It gives a more natural look
and it works a lot better in type design and also in logo design.
And if you are one of the lucky ones that stayed to the end, please
write in the comments 'Lemon' and I will catch you in the next video.
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