Deconstructing Designing: 8 Psychological Principles behind Graphic Designing

When it comes to graphic designing, your work immediately comprises of making choices – choices that will influence the actual outcome in the end. Your chosen colour palettes, typography, gradients, shapes, and graphics is responsible for creating the visual imagery of your brand, one that will speak to your target audience. A designer constructs and compiles elements to create a design but we are going to deconstruct what goes inside his head while he is busy crafting.

“Design is thinking made visual.”

When you sit down to write a blog, your audience already knows what is going on inside your creative head – you are writing it down for people to read and comprehend. Sounds simple?

A graphic designer on the other hand has to portray his expression visually with the help of creative elements. A good design speaks volumes about the designer and his psychology in question. However, when we are talking about deconstructing the psychology of a designer, we are not implying that we will    instruct you on the rights and wrongs of designing.

“Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.”

8 Psychological Principles to Change Your Design Perception:

• Mental Model Mapping

User experience (UX) designers prefer the mental model mapping process while designing something new like a website layout or brand logo . In the entire process, designers try to uncover and act on the phrases that a user may find intuitive.

In short, the mental model is a process of mapping out what a designer understand about the real world and replicating the models into design matching the virtual space. The method is all about attempting to uncover your audience's intuitive process.

For designers, understanding what mental modeling is and why it is essential to process a simple design for the user experience is vital. Perform an intuitive check during the designing procedure like - are the visuals moving top to bottom or right to left or vice versa? Moreover, is the message clear in your logo and easily understandable? Or is it intentionally hidden?

A colonial check with a friend or coworker is an excellent way to monitor whether your mental modeling is working well while designing or not.

• The Von Restorff Effect

The Von Restorff Effect clearly illustrates the idea that the oddball out there is one that gets remembered.

While designing your website or logo, you must want to draw your audiences' eyes to one spot, even though there are other intriguing elements around it. It ultimately means using a different color, size, block, font, etc.

Von Restorff Effect is precisely the same, making an item looks different by its color, shape or size, or other characteristics that will be more readily recalled than the others. You can also make a remarkable design by placing similar elements next to the individual details. Like, a pair of red shoes among white shoes. Von Restorff Effect will give you various ideas that will stand out to the viewers.

• Visceral Reactions

You may have come across the website, photo, or other visual elements that you fall for without knowing the reason or could not explain why. It is probably because of visceral reactions. Visceral reactions are the type of response that comes from the gut.

Designing visceral reactions into design creates a positive aesthetic impression on viewers. Eventually, to some extent, it explains what looks pleasing to people and what does not. Some travel websites like Airbnb indulge visceral designs capturing the charm and exotic aesthetic of travel.

Using visceral reactions into designs is as simple as using beautiful photography and (or) colorful imagery to capture the audience's attention.

• Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt psychology explains how different elements catch on to each other visually. This principle focuses on how design elements are grouped.

Proximity: It is the idea of various objects placing together near each other when they are seen together as a group rather than the individual.

Closure: Closure is when a particular shape is still apprehending as a whole even though the object is not fully closed in reality.

Similarity: Similarity is where the object looks similar and perceived as one object or a part of the same group as the NCB logo.

Continuity: Like the Olympic logo, the eye moves naturally from one portion to another. It happens in parallel when the creation of curved lines allows the eye to flow with the line.

Figure and ground: Here, the eye notices an object as an object and separates it from surrounding areas.

• The color psychology

Different colors are often associated with diverse human feelings or thoughts. So, designers had to go through several processes to perceive which color is associated with human moods. We have listed below a great infographic on the psychology of colors related to human emotions and moods.

Blue: Expresses calm, security, trustworthiness, strong, caring, honest, professionalism, and intelligence.

Black: Expresses formal, sophistication, luxury, authority, seductive, and elegance.

Red: Expresses love, excitement, bold, passion, action, love, energy, warmth, and aggression.

Orange: Expresses happiness, friendly, and affordability.

Green: Expresses fresh, organic, natural, growth, earth, money, newness, and peace.

Yellow: Expresses optimism, confidence, advance-thinking, playfulness, logic, youthful exuberance, and creativity.

White: Expresses purity, cleanliness, and innocence.

Purple: Expresses creativity, nostalgia, and imagination.

Multi-color: Expresses positive, bold, boundless, and multi-channel.

• The psychology of shapes

Similar to colors, certain human emotions and characteristics are linked with different shapes. Here is a basic rundown of the psychology of shapes that boils down to particular features of people.

Ellipses, Circles, & Ovals: These types of shapes convey positive emotional messages strapped with community, friendship, relationship, love, unity, and femininity.

Triangles and Squares: Denotes balance, stability and strength, professionalism, power, masculinity, and efficiency.

Vertical Lines: Shows aggression, strength, masculinity.

Horizontal Lines: Conveys tranquility, calm, community.

• Cost-Benefit Analysis

Every decision that we make goes into cost-benefit analysis, the process of weighing the costs and the benefits of an action before we take it. A designer should make sure every design has benefits that overweight the costs. This process guides to make simplistic content for the audience by still fulfilling the goal of the content.

• Dual-Coding Theory

Dual coding theory is an idea where both visual and verbal cues can represent objectives. Make use of both can help the brain recall those ideas faster. You may probably hear of the statistic before that, the human brain processes visual information 60,000X quicker than text.

So, when you design gripping in mind dual coding theory, it illustrates the idea as much as possible and enhances the brain to digest and remember the information.

Conclusion:

However, to design and sell products, you need to keep in mind these psychological principles. Thus, you can get fruitful results through well-designing. Customers will remember those products that hit the psychological aspects of them.

Dream Logo Design is here to help you with the designing process for your brand. Our team of competent designers understand psychology and bring out effective designs by following useful principles.