
Develop your design thinking by predicting how people react to visuals and applying gestalt principles to enhance perception and effective visual communication.
Discover the theory behind graphic design and learn to analyze, recall, and apply 500 principles to create engaging visual communications across print, web, and mobile.
Explore the gestalt principles as the grammar of visual communication, rooted in psychology, and understand how perception, emergence, and the whole design—combining typography, images, shapes, and colors—inform effective graphic design.
Explore how Gestalt principles shape the Unilever logo, highlighting simplicity, figure-ground, similarity, common fate, closure, symmetry, continuation, and proximity to emphasize visual relationships and coherence.
Explore how closure fills missing details and uses negative space and reification to balance detail and abstraction in logos, with examples like Johnnie Walker and the panda WWF.
Explore how continuity connects dots, lines, and curves with gradual transitions to guide the viewer’s eye from one point to another, creating a visually pleasing, easily understood design.
Explore how continuity guides readability in typographic posters by weaving lines, covered letters, and interconnected motifs to create legible, engaging designs.
Master the figure-ground relationship, where the figure is the subject and the ground the background, and explore multi-stability, Necker cube, and lower region cues.
Explore achromatic compositions that exploit multistability and figure-ground relations, showing how white details reveal or conceal objects, establish visual hierarchy, and invite perception shifts across posters and logos.
Explore how the common fate principle unifies elements—regardless of size or shape—by directing movement toward a shared trajectory, creating harmony, emphasis, and clear focal points in composition and design.
Embrace simplicity in graphic design by removing unnecessary elements and using a few colors and typefaces. Apply kiss and Hicks' law to speed understanding and keep messages clear for viewers.
Explore how brands reduce logos and icons to simple, recognizable forms, using consistency, geometric shapes, and negative space to communicate identity with less detail.
Explore symmetry types: reflection, bilateral, and radial, and observe how combining them with asymmetry, especially in logo design, creates balanced, engaging designs, as seen in Rogue One and Titanic.
Explore translational, reflection, glide reflection, and radial symmetry, showing how repetition and depth create balance and unity. See how asymmetry adds drama and helps logo and poster design.
Explore past experience, a subjective gestalt principle, and how viewers rely on familiar icons like the poetry of Van Gogh, McDonald's fries, and the universal traffic light.
Explore the gestalt principle of similarity, invariance, and closure to connect similar elements, reveal differences, and design readable, engaging visuals across interfaces, posters, and logos.
Use uniform connectedness to link elements with lines and arrows, creating visual pathways that connect information across complex layouts and infographics.
Explore creating common regions by grouping elements in a closed area with frames, background colors, lines, or whitespace, guided by subtle alignment.
Explore proximity as a gestalt rule that signals relatedness through closeness and grouping, and see how designers flip it with kerning, typography, and nearby elements.
Review the glossary, PDFs, and course content, then take the final quiz to test knowledge and spark inspiration for your next design project with references on the M.A. boards.
Design is all around us, and it's a huge part of our daily lives. But have you ever stopped to think about why certain designs are effective, while others are not?
Welcome to the exciting world of Design Psychology!
In my new series, we'll be exploring the secrets of how design can be used to influence human behavior.
You'll gain a deep understanding of how people perceive the world around them, and how you can use that knowledge to create more effective and persuasive designs.
Trends come and go, but the underlying psychological principles that drive human behavior remain constant. By understanding these principles, you'll be able to create designs that will appeal to people all over the world, regardless of current fashion trends.
So join me on this journey of discovery, and learn how to use the power of psychology to create designs that will make a lasting impact.
Who would benefit from this course the most
If you are a graphic, motion, UX or interior designer then you will love this course!
This course is designed to help you understand the universal laws of visual communication, so that you can confidently make decisions about your own design work. You'll learn how to see like a seasoned professional designer, spotting the slight errors (or brilliance) in any design concept. And you'll understand why and how something works or doesn't work.
By understanding the universal laws of visual communication you will gain confidence in making critical decisions on your design, and that will not only speed up your design process but will give you a guideline throughout it.
You will start to see like a seasoned professional designer, noticing the slight error (or brilliance) in any design concept, understanding how your audience will see it. You will know why and how something works or not.
Think about this for a second! How would this knowledge translate into earnings for a freelance graphic designer or UX designer? Simply the ability to predict how people will react to your designs?
What will we cover in this course?
We’ll explore the practical Psychology of Design in depth with visual examples:
Understand the universal laws of visual communication, so that you can confidently make decisions about your own design work.
This course will teach you the most effective application of the Gestalt principles, so you can create designs that are not only visually appealing, but also highly effective.
Learn about Closure, Continuity, Similarity and Simplicity and how they can help you design better visuals.
Understand how viewers interpret visual information, you can create compositions that are both effective and pleasing to the eye.
Make critical decisions much faster throughout the design process with this easy to understand
Mastering by examples
Thanks to the hundreds of real life examples we will go through together, this will be a really entertaining, fun course that you will really enjoy to follow and find easy to understand.
By the end of the course, you'll have a deeper understanding of how the human brain processes information and how you can use this knowledge to create more effective visual designs.
About me and my new Graphic Design Theory Series
The Graphic Design Theory Series (Design Psychology is the third part) is the essence of my 15+ years of teaching graphic design, and 20+ years of working as a freelance designer at the highest level.
I was fortunate to teach more than a 100.000 students worldwide and was voted as one of the 5 best Adobe instructors of the World. Here in Udemy, some of my courses are all time best sellers and are considered the best in their category.
The challenge of teaching Design Theory is that everything is related, and I have a very effective and unique approach to explore this amazing subject in an enjoyable, easy to understand manner, that will help you to build deep understanding in it fast.
I’m inviting you to one of the most eye-opening journeys in your Graphic Design studies, exploring the mysteries of human perception!
Come along, let’s start this journey together!
Martin