Design Comparison

One of my favorite bands growing up all throughout high school was Yellowcard. They burst on to the scene with the song "Ocean Avenue," and continued to rock my ears off from that moment on. I had a lot of fun listening to their albums as they released them over the years, and some of them were pretty cool to look at while others made me a little dizzy. The two images I have chosen were album covers they had, and one is pretty good while the others is pretty terrible according to Gestalt principles.

THE GOOD

This is a good design for a few reasons. The first of course are the lines. The road in the middle of the image leads you to the big bright city. It gives you closure as you look at it because it is taking you somewhere. The law of similarity makes you group the bright houses together, and you also group the white dots on the dark surface as stars in the sky. Not to mention the street lights or trees being grouped together as well, giving this the feeling of a quiet suburb outside of the noisy city. The houses were also grouped together because of their proximity.

THE BAD

This image kind of gives me anxiety, and makes me feel like I'm in an episode of the twilight zone. The "rips" on the image won't let our brains rest because it doesn't follow the law of continuity. The image is blurred which doesn't allow us to group anything together and make any sense of it. Are those trees or weird dandelions? Are they just floating there? What's the dark thing in the bottom left corner? A good image following Gestalt principles(law of similarity, closure, pragnanz, proximity) would not leave us having so many questions about the image. I get the band trying to draw focus to the name of "Lights and Sounds," but good heck! I have too much anxiety about their album cover to even enjoy listening to their music.