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I disagree with your disagreement. The brain has a strong preference for simple patterns. The more it can compress information down into assumed symmetries and
by IIAOPSW 4y ago
I disagree with your disagreement. The brain has a strong preference for simple patterns. The more it can compress information down into assumed symmetries and extrapolations, the more "pleasing" it feels. There's always a mathematical explanation, even if you're not consciously aware of it. In the "optically aligned" example, the 2nd object is aligned about its center of mass rather than its height/width pixel border.
- atoav 4y agoThere can always be an mathematical explaination sure. But that won't help you as a designer if there is no way to know/apply that explaination beforehand. There is probably also a (quite complex) mathematical rule to drive your car on a public road, so it should be simple to implement automatic driving, right? Optical weight is nice and all (and a better simple rule than just spacing things by equal distance), but in the end you also have other phenomena (humans perceive horizontal lines different than vertical ones etc.) Just the seemingly simple task of spacing out letters can get complicated pretty fast if it should look pleasing as in "as if there was no design there".
- notahacker 4y agoIt's also the case that some of the simplest and most intuitive possible mathematical rules are going to look less good than some less mathematically elegant ratio, like picking line spacing for body text which is exactly the font-size or exactly twice the font-size rather than somewhere between 1.2x - 1.5x