Gestalt Principles

Before you consciously compare a single value on a chart, your brain has already grouped what it's looking at — into clusters, categories and stand-out elements — using a handful of built-in rules psychologists call the Gestalt principles. A chart that works with those rules feels effortless to read; one that fights them makes the reader do conscious work your design should have done for them. Seven principles are commonly grouped under this name: Simplicity, Continuity, Proximity, Similarity, Focal Point, Correspondence and Figure/Ground. Five get their own interactive tab below, each on the same small set of numbers so only one thing changes at a time. The other two show up differently: Simplicity is really the idea running underneath all five tabs rather than a demo of its own, and Correspondence — the risk of leaning on colours like red and green to mean "bad" and "good" — appears as a caution inside the Focal Point tab instead of a full tab of its own.

Pick a tab below to try one.

What this teaches: See Gestalt principles such as continuity, proximity, similarity, focal point and figure/ground applied to one small chart. It teaches how viewers group visual elements before reading any values, and how to design charts that work with that grouping.

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