EVOLUTION OF GESTALT PRINCIPLES IN CONTEMPORARY GRAPHIC DESIGN

From the very beginning of XX century the principles of Gestalt helped humans to simplify and structure their visual surrounding. Despite aesthetic evolutions, it always helped to keep the clarity and readability of visual messages. Alas, development of global digital communications simulated the appearance of many stereotypes, clichés and templates, which has led to a loss of quality and originality, total convergence of visual language. Today, when marketing – orientated designers replaces visual artists creating posters and prints, attention and reconsideration of visual information, encoded in their graphics, gets a growing importance. Knowingly made visual errors, inaccuracies can not only attract the attention, but also encourage the viewers to rethink them. On the other side, ingeniously disintegrated parts of the composition or some “visual riddles” provokes the viewer to turn his intelligence on; as a result, the whole of the visual message acquires a much greater value than it’s separate parts. The mentioned development of digital technologies also offers unlimited image transformation capabilities, and also encourages wider use of dynamic compositions, based on video formats. Quick visible changes or movements (from chaos to structure etc.) helps to attract and keep viewer’s attention. The study of changes in Gestalt principles most of all concerns prints and poster as a universal genre of graphic design that combines individual artistic expression with adaptive graphic communication. The research of exchanges is based on analysis of examples of printed and digital Gestalt applications.