Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated
by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
Law of Prägnanz
A tendency to interpret ambiguous images as simple and complete, versus complex and incomplete.1
The Law of Prägnanz is one of several principles referred to as Gestalt principles of perception. It asserts that when people are presented with a set of ambiguous elements (elements that can be interpreted in different ways), they interpret the elements in the simplest way. Here, “simplest” refers to arrangements having fewer rather than more elements, having symmetrical rather than asymmetrical compositions, and generally observing the other Gestalt principles of perception.2
For example, a set of shapes that touches at their edges could be interpreted as either adjacent or overlapping. When the shapes are complex, the simplest interpretation ...
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