This is video number three in my series about how to use Gestalt psychology in
your slide design. In the last video we talked about how to use simplicity to
take this slide and make it simple so it looked like this. But notice a problem
with this slide? if your entire presentation looked like this slide,
after slide, after slide it'd be really boring. It's boring and it's too plain so
we need to add some more design to make it more interesting.
This slide is in need of some serious help, but where do we start?
Yeah I got nothing. Let's ask my research assistant, Sage, and see what he thinks.
Sage, what do you think? Sage is totally right. All this text, it basically looks
all the same. Which reminds me of the Gestalt principle of similarity. And now
that I'm thinking of it the slide feels a little cramped, which makes me think of
the proximity principle, too. Let me explain what those are and then show you
how to use those principles to make this slide better. The principle of proximity
states that elements that are close together are seen as one unit. Elements
that aren't close together are seen as separate. Kind of like when you're with
that really weird and awkward friend and then you see someone really cool, so you
pretend like you aren't with that friend by physically distancing yourself. That's
not very nice you know. The principle of similarity states that elements that
share visual characteristics like shape, size, and color will look like they
belong in one unit. Kind of like how in every zombie movie people don't get
eaten by the horde when they cover themselves up in zombie slime. They make
themselves similar. Still not sure what I mean?
Let me give you some more concrete examples. Let's go over to my best friend
PowerPoint so I can show you. I don't know her... Let's first talk about
proximity which, again, basically means stuff that is close together will look
like it belongs together. For example, what do you see here? Probably a bunch of
random shapes on the slide, right? You probably aren't really sure what you're
looking at and if I asked you to count the number of shapes you'd probably be
annoyed with me. So tell me what you see now? You might still see a bunch of shapes
but I'm willing to bet that you also see a square that happens to be made up of
shapes. All I did was bring the shapes together.
I made them close to each other and remember from the first video our brain
likes to see the outline before the individual parts. So your brain right now
is most likely trying to see the square instead of the sixteen individual shapes.
And if I add some more space in between here, now you probably see four columns
of shapes because the shapes within each column are now closer to each other than
the shapes in the other columns. So the key here is that if you want to make
things on your slide part of the same group, then make them close to each other.
On the flip side, if you want to tell your audience that elements aren't in
the same group then add some space in between them. So that's proximity. Now
let's talk about similarity. Again this is basically stuff that looks the same,
has the same design features will look as though it's all part of the same
group. Let's go back to this slide here. Thanks to proximity we're more likely to
see a square than sixteen individual shapes, right? But let's be real. Our brain
has to do some extra work to get that because of all the different colors. It
is distracting. But if I made everything the same color, well now all of a sudden
it becomes a little easier to see it as a square, doesn't it? So we can use
similar colors to make the audience perceive that these are all part of the
same group. We can also use shapes to do this. So if we take all these here and
make them the exact same shape, now it's even
easier to see this as one cohesive group, and as a square of circles. Now we can
use both similarity and proximity together to make people see what we want.
Let's say I want you to see four columns instead of a square. All I have to do is
add some white space in between. Now you see four columns. And we can keep playing
with this. Let's say I want you to see four small groups. Well all I need to do
is use similarity and proximity to do that. And again, we can bring back color
to add more depth to this. Right now you see one group but let's say I want you
to see four groups without changing the proximity. I can use color to do that. Now
you probably see four rows, or two rows of blue circles and two rows of gray
circles. So just adding some color turned this square into rows without
adjusting the proximity at all. So I can use color and shape to group things. I
can also use size. By adjusting the size you now see three rows of small circles
and one row of big circles. And again, using multiple strategies all at once
makes it even easier to tell what belongs together. So here we use shape to
distinguish the four rows. So you now see four circles, four hearts, four Harry
Potter scars, and four stars. But what do you see when I add some color? Now we're
back to four columns because the color is more meaningful to us than the shape.
And if we add in another layer by using proximity, then it's even more obvious
that it's four columns. Or we can go back to the original and use everything
together to create four separate rows. We can use shape, color, and proximity to
separate each row. Using all of them together means it's really easy to see
that we have four separate rows. So to show your audience that objects belong
together, keep them close and use the same color, shape, size, etc. And to let
them know things aren't in the same group, keep them apart and use different
colors, shapes, sizes, and etc. So now let's talk about what actually belongs
together and what should be distinct in your slides. The heading text is one
group and it should be different or distinct than the body text. They are not
part of the same group. So there, you have two groups already. Heading and body text.
And then within the body text group, each separate point needs to be a little
different, too, so it doesn't all run together and look like a wall of text.
Congratulations! You now know the basics of similarity and proximity. No prob,
corncob! Now it's time to apply this information on our slide. This is where
we left off in the last video. Can you spot the problems with similarity and
proximity here? Let's start with similarity. So that's our heading and
body, and like we just talked about these should be distinct. They should be
different so that people know exactly which part is the heading and which part
is the body. And technically they try to do that. There is a different color used
for the heading and the body, and the heading is a bigger font size than the
body. But we can totally do better than that. For starters, the heading is only a
size 32 and that body text is a size 18. Both of those are way too small. Your
text should always be at least a size 30 if you want people to actually see it.
And they look really close in size because, well, they are close in size. So
I'm going to make the heading and body text bigger and make the difference
between the two bigger. But now I have a problem with proximity.
There's no space between that heading and the body text. So I need to scoot
that down a bit. Okay. But we're still struggling with similarity. The heading
and the body look too similar because it's the same typeface for both. So I'm
going to make the heading arial black and the body text century gothic. And now
I can actually make that a little smaller because it's a bigger typeface.
Now not only can we actually read the text but it's pretty obvious which one
is the heading and which one is the body. So I guess we could stop there,
but remember how I said each separate point within the body text should be
separate from each other? Well right now that's not the case. In fact it's all the
same text and so close together that it looks like one big square or wall of
text. So we need to add a little more space in between each of these rows. Okay.
Now that looks better. The heading looks clearly different from the body text
because they look like distinct groups. And all the body text looks separate
from each other so it's clear there are four separate points. We've come a long
way, don't you think? So far we've simplified the slide by
reducing the text, getting rid of clutter, and making the information route simple.
And we've used similarity and proximity to group all that text on the slide.
Hopefully you're already seeing the benefits of using visual perception
research to design your slides. If you liked today's video please share and
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you in the next video. bye.