I took a picture of the sheet of printer paper that I drew the design on with my phone; then I used Twitter to transfer the image from my phone to an album accessible from my (or any) computer. When I uploaded the image, I couldn't help but apply the photo filter that shared a name with the piece, "Cool".
The image employs multiple principles of Gestalt Theory, the most obvious being continuation. Taking advantage of our tendency to read from left to right, the eye is drawn center-left to start and then moves to the right. The "waves" develop from left to right as well, forming the characters "C" and "oo". The waves and the eye end up running into a wall, or the "l". The proximity of the waves and the wall allows the word "Cool" to be decoded from the design. Closure permits the simple "V"s to be understood as seagulls and the dotted line atop the wall to be perceived as a chain with touching, interlocking loops.
The filter makes it more difficult to distinguish, but the waves are drawn in blue ink while the wall and the seagulls are drawn with a black pen. The colors distinguish water from solids by similarity.
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One of my favorite bands is Killswitch Engage. The special edition of their second self-titled album, released in 2009, has this cover:
The design uses closure and some proximity to form the shadowed heads, and figure/ground is manipulated to determine whether you are looking at a snake's eye and spotted hood or a leopard's nose and eye.
-Bryant Bienz
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