Static and Moving Patterns

The brain is a powerful pattern-finding engine; this is the fundamental reason why visualization techniques are becoming important. The brain appears to be especially good at discovering linear features and distinct objects, so much so that the discovery of spurious patterns should always be a concern. This chapter presents the Gestalt laws of pattern perception that leads to obvious rules to any visual designer. For information to be clearly related, the visual structure should reflect relationships between data entities. Placing data glyphs in spatial proximity, linking them with lines, or enclosing them within a contour will provide the necessary visual structure to make them seem related. The visual system contains a number of mechanisms for finding contours. These contours can be simple lines, dots, or other features in a linear pattern; boundaries between regions of different textures, different colors, different motion; or even illusory contours.