Beirce Library Trip #1: Figure-Ground

What's that? I found most of these books on the ground floor of the library? Huh...figures...

What did I find today?

Today, as the first of a three-part series, I payed a visit to the University of Akron Bierce Library, where I was on the hunt for the first of my three newly-learned Gestalt principles - figure-ground. Let's take a look at these examples that I found scattered across the library:

Top-Left: This is one of the more simple types of figure ground seen within these examples, but it is still effective in establishing the design principle. The viewer is unable to tell whether or not the figure (the abstract shape made with a series of arrows) is created by the dark red color or the light red color - it's ambiguous.

Top-Right: While this example of figure-ground is also rather simple, it plays with the viewer's past experience - in my case, for example, I saw this cover as an abstract way of depicting a section of a paper map. Perceiving the cover in this way presents an ambiguity as to whether the "land masses" of this "map" are represented by the white space or the black space of the cover.

Bottom-Left: This example of figure ground is very similar to the first example explained earlier, but the difference here is that the same shape is not present on both the black and the white. Despite having different words presented as figures on their respective grounds, the cover is still effective in presenting the viewer with an uncertainty as to whether the black or the white is on top.

Bottom-Right: Out of all four examples here, this is my personal favorite use of figure-ground, as it uses it in a unique way that I've never seen before. On this cover, figure-ground has been used to make a sort of intersecting gradient effect, and it's unclear as to whether this is a blue gradient transitioning into a green gradient, or vice versa.

And that concludes the takeaway of Bierce Library trip #1. Continuation is the next principle on my scavenger hunt, so stay tuned for Bierce Library Trip #2!