My Interpretation of Visual Design

Visual design in in our everyday life.  We see visual design in adverting and social media, education, and fashion. When we as consumers, are triggered to buy a new brand of shampoo solely because of the bottle’s aesthetics instead of the formula’s ingredients we must understand that it is all by design.  That is visual design.   Visual design is compromise of three foundational components: 1) Elements of design, 2) Principles of design, and 3) Laws of Gestalt theory. (Hagen and Golombisky, 2013).  These design tools are strategic to elicit a feeling or emotion that produces behaviors to buy or in education, an emotion to create connections for learning.

Visual design uses theories, elements, and principles to strategically produce the visual cues to have an emotional effect.  Using specific colors, placements, and theories such as Gestalt law of proximity to create movement of the eyes which triggers the brain to make specific interpretations, associations and evokes emotion to solidify the connection. Norman (2004) makes the point of colors such as red and the idea of symmetry is at the visceral level of emotion which in design is related to Attractiveness. Design principles and elements provoke visceral connection base on the attractiveness of the images, or product.  Norman (2004) later makes the distinction of behavior and reflective levels of emotion as usability and meta-cognition in his theory of emotional design. Visual design is tools to foster to all three levels of emotion as “emotion prepares us for action (Norman. 2004)”.

Overall, visual design revolves around using visual cues to create synaptic connections through cognition to trigger emotions and behavior.  It incorporates these external factors i.e. visual cues and internal factor i.e. mental cognition to produce a desired behavior and emotion.    This desired behavior or emotion can trigger you to purchase items, wear your hair in a certain style or behavior can look like engagement in learning environments i.e. “usability or functionality (Norman. 2004)”. 

References

Dirksen, J. (2016). Design for how people learn. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, Pearson.

Hagen, R.  & Golombisky, K. (2013).  White space is not your enemy. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, Taylor & Francis Group.

Norman, D. 2004 (Speaker). Emotional design: The Principles [Audio podcast]. Presentation made at the 2004 O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail69.html