Fawn's Dreamscape

Everyday we encounter an amalgam of visuals. What we choose to focus on is completely individual, but some things can't help but receive a visual hierarchy. Colin Ware, the author of Visual Thinking for Design, states that we can only have one immediate focus. At the same time, we can only keep track of 4 things (generally in our periphery). While cycling in Centrum Rotterdam, I couldn't help but experience an overtaking, flashing blue and white lights that engulfed a large building. It was like a parade of lights. Amongst the dark buildings and colorful signs that lined the streets, this is what spoke to me. It stood out against the mishmash of florescent signs, a scrolling ad board, which I barely noticed stood in my periphery.

Why? The building was grandiose and full of contrasting colors that moved in a pattern that had a dream like twinkle. Visual pattern recognition, which is made up of motion, contrasting colors, orientation and texture was in full swing.

Unfortunately, my dreamscape only lasted for a couple seconds. Try to see if you can figure out why.

DISTORTED PATTERN RECOGNITION

DISTORTED PATTERN RECOGNITION

Humans have a much stronger ability to recognize patterns, especially when they are familiar with them. Colin Ware writes: V4 neurons still respond strongly to patterns despite distortions that stretch or rotate the pattern [...] (Visual Thinking for Design, Colin Ware, P.57).

An example in our daily life is the CAPTCHA (Computer Aided Public Turing test to tell Humans and Computers Apart). It is a method to assure that a human, in contrary to a computer, is giving the response. Captchas are distorted pieces of text, sometimes combined with angled lines, generated by a computer. A person then has to decipher the text in the distorted image and give the right answer.

For a detailed description klick here