77 – UI That Rocks / Understanding Gestalt design principles with Piccia Neri

In this episode:

Discussion – Should we white-label WordPress? – [4:10]

WP Builds is brought to you by...

and

Interview – UI That Rocks / Understanding Gestalt design principles with Piccia Neri – [23:55]

Ending Fact – Video persuades people to buy things! – [1:15:46]

10% off Piccia’s webinar series “Design for Geeks” with offer code: “wpbuilds”

I like this episode for many reasons, but mainly because, when it comes to design, I have the same level of talent as a turnip. In fact, I think that if you threw a turnip at a PC which had Photoshop open, it might well do a better job than me!

What I’m saying is that I don’t know much about design. I’m one of those people who knows what they like when they see it. So I’m basically your worst client!

Luckily there are people out there who do understand design. They think about it deeply and understand why some combinations of colours and shapes work well (good designers) and others don’t (me and turnips).

Piccia Neri is one such person; she’s good at design and understanding design.

Coming from a background in art history, she moved over to the web and has been applying her knowledge to web design ever since.

She worked within a school of thought called ‘Gestalt’, and it’s utterly fascinating. It’s kind of the place where art and science collide. It endeavours to create principles of design based around what the human brain enjoys seeing; this looks good – for this reason, and this looks like a turnip created it – for this reason.

Think about it, we’re all drawn to some commonalities of design, some things just look appealing. That’s your brain processing what you see and making sense of it.

Recently I was at WordCamp London and saw Piccia do a talk which uses the same slides as she does here and the thing that I liked about it most was the fact that I suddenly had a new vocabulary to label design principles; new words that fitted to things that I kind of knew, but didn’t know had a taxonomy.

I’m not explaining this very well, so you should probably listen to the podcast to get a better understanding!

Piccia’s slides can be found here…

Remember… 10% off Piccia’s webinar series “Design for Geeks” with offer code: “wpbuilds”