Survey Results

I think it is essential at this point to do a survey to get a grasp of how informed my audience are.

Who is my audience?

My audience is predominantly graphic designers of any age. I will be sending a link to this survey to some professional designers whose feedback I think would be beneficial, I will post it around to the course, all levels if possible, and potentially onto some design forums if I feel this is appropriate at the time.

What do I need to find out?

I would like to find out whether designers have heard about the Gestalt Principles and whether they think they are important to consider when practicing design. 

How will I inform?

For those who are unaware of what the Gestalt Principles are I will attach the handout I created a while ago to the top of the survey as a brief overview of the seven key principles I will be referring to. This will also be a test as to whether my handout is successful in its' explanation. 

What questions:

1. Are you aware of what the Gestalt principles are?

2. Do you think that all designers should be using them as a tool?

3. This will be an open question where I can get some qualitative feedback. In the box below please describe one piece of design that reflects one of the principles and if possible add a link to it.

Hypothesis:

The outcome I would generally expect is to reach around fifty designers and get some new and useful feedback. I want to see how others perceive the principles and if they are clear initially or whether deeper research is needed before fully understanding them. 

The results of my survey were fairly surprising in terms of how many examples I was successfully provided by respondents. 

My first question showed that 53% of people taking the survey said they had not heard of the Gestalt principles before, this is unsurprising to me and if anything I potentially expected a slightly higher percentage than this. This is a concern that I will focus on, why people aren't aware of these principles and what can be done to change this. 

My second question shows that 69% of people taking the survey said that they believe graphic designers should be using these principles as a guideline. 

My third question was open and gave me a really wide variety of feedback (see below) it was clear as I was collecting all the results that closure was the principle most people had referred to within the image they had sent in. This could be due to this being one of the easiest principles to understand or possible it being one of the more common ones that designers use. 

Based on my Level 5 primary research investigation I would have expected to see 'figure and ground' and 'symmetry' as the top two most popular again. However figure and ground was one of the lowest image counts. Closure and symmetry were the two highest scoring, reinforcing the use of symmetry being popular amongst designs and designers. 

What was also interesting to me was the dominant focus on logos, I didn't give a specificity to the type of design I wanted to see but it seemed people turned straight to logos for their chosen example. I think the principles are much easier to see and identify within logos and this is the reason why. 

Below is the collection of logos that was received from the respondents and the categories to which they fall under.