What are the Gestalt Principles? Gestalt Principles, or Gestalt Laws, are rules regarding how the human brain perceives structure, recognizes patterns, and breaks down complex images. These elements are crucial in data visualizations because they help facilitate understanding when we present our insights to our audience. Using the Gestalt Principles, the audience can more clearly understand the elements of a data visualization and gives them an obvious path to follow throughout your data story.

The seven Gestalt Principles are:

Proximity: Things that are close together appear to be more related than things that are spaced farther apart.

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Similarity: When we perceive things that appear to be similar to each other – same color, shape, etc., we group them together.

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Closure: We perceive open structures as closed, complete, and regular whenever there is a way to reasonably interpret them as such.

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Enclosure: We perceive objects contained in an enclosure by anything that forms a visual border around them as belonging together.

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Continuity: The human eye follows lines, curves, or a sequence of shapes in order to determine a relationship between design elements.

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Connection: We perceive elements that are connected to one another as a single group as opposed to objects that are not linked in the same manner.

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Figure and Ground: We perceive objects as either being in the foreground or the background. They either standout in front of the figure or blend into the background.

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Implementing these principles will not only make your data visualization easier to understand, but make your overall product more succinct and visually appealing!