National Geographic Website

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Figure and ground: Nationally Geographic is typically known for its black and yellow colors. However, on the website, black is only present in the navigation bar. The background for the rest of the website it white and the yellow accents don’t stand out very well against it.

Proximity and alignment: The font is a very simple sans serif that looks a lot like Arial. While it is used consistently throughout the website, I don’t think it really engages the viewer. I’d expect a website like National Geographic that is known for its stunning visuals, to choose a more interesting font.

Visual hierarchy: Titles and headlines are bigger than the sub-heads/captions for the things which they are explaining. These main headlines are also highlighted with yellow which does show importance in this case because the other information features no color at all. And for almost every piece of information there is a picture to accompany it. The picture is generally very big and is proportional to the size of the headline. The picture helps to draw readers attention and then their eye will follow below and read the information that goes with the picture.

Blog Assignment: Gestalt Principles in Web Design

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Gestalt is a psychology term describing how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or “unified wholes” based on certain principles.

Some of the gestalt principles include:

  • figure and ground: establish significant differences between the object and its background, making the object stand out from its surroundings.
  • proximity and alignment: use the same font, color, or alignment to create unity.
  • continuation: elements were positioned on a line or a curve to indicate continuation or connectedness.
  • visual hierarchy: use size, shape or color variation to tell viewers which part are important, and which part are supplemental.

This week for the blog, you need to choose a website and talk about how the designer of that website applied those gestalt principles.

To learn more about gestalt principles and web design, read here.

Web Design: Smucker’s

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I personally love Smucker’s web design. They use a lot of colors and stick to a certain theme by incorporating a lot of pictures that have to do with each section of the website. I love how on the home page, as you scroll down the page it tells you Smucker’s mission and what they are truly about. It incorporates beautiful pictures of fruits and and foods that you can make with their products. This web design also gives off a happy feeling making you want to explore the website even more, essentially becoming more aware of the company and their products, which could lead to purchasing the product. This website gives me a lot of ideas that I could use in my web design.