Fully Engaged

When reading magazines or newspapers, most of us usually do not consider the enormous amount of thought that goes into the images placed before us in advertisements. Advertisements are designed to entice the viewer’s eyes and hold them, attracting them to the image in front of us. When flipping through a magazine recently, this ad for DKNY’s Be Delicious perfume did just that. The comic-like graphics create a unified design using two classic Gestalt principles: repetition and symmetry.

The repetition is seen in the layered apple shapes on the left, right, and bottom of the page. This repetition is broken by the one apple on the bottom right that has been turned into a perfume bottle. This break in repetition draws our eyes to the bottle, the item the ad is selling. But our focus is dragged around the rest of the page by the repeating similar shapes, allowing us to fully engage in the advertisement.

Another Gestalt principle, symmetry, pulls our attention to the focal point of the ad, the bottle. If a line is drawn down the center of the image, we can see that the shapes of the apples on each side reflect each other. The perfume bottle almost blends in with this symmetry, but its slight tilt and additional detailing sets it off from the rest, again gaining the viewer’s focus.

While Gestalt principles are meant to bring unity to a design, they can also be manipulated to emphasize the focal point of the design, like this advertisement does. This causes each viewer to immediately understand the point of the ad, so that all will be enticed by DKNY’s perfume.
(picture courtesy of Design You Trust, copyrighted by Donna Karan Cosmetics)