Implied Motion

The unusual image above shows an interpretation of a dresser whose story is demonstrated through the implication of movement. The off-shooting drawer chunks seem to naturally fit together with flush edges, and the natural human process of grouping (by this, I mean connecting the dots, or drawers) give us an understanding of what once may have been. These ejections diverge outward similar to a kind of explosion, from the base, and the convergence of the solid, bottom portion toward its center add to the over-arching visual of some kind of bedroom-volcano accouterment.

The quirk of this design is reminiscent of an early Disney design. Maybe a fuming anthropomorphicized furnishing who's quite full of being used as storage, literally. This piece finds humor in its strange application of the principle of implied motion.

Here is another example of a seemingly moving object, produced by graduate student Vicki Fu of San Francisco State University. The motion in this lamp is one of growth and spiraling. She accomplished this through the use of sequential light nodes of even space and shape. The blue and white "petals" create lines by proximity, as an example of the Gestalt concepts of attraction and grouping. Not only the spinning, but the climbing action embodied in the tiers demonstrate motion. This vertical ascent can be seen to represent the growth that living beings share. The structural elements wind the way vines or stems might. Vicki made use of this implied motion, along with the contours of each level, for bio-mimickry, to enhance the organic look and feel of this flowery design.

Tone and Color

Pictured above, we have another shot of the StarCraft II user interface. Notice the use of variation in tone and color can aid in the structure and organization of a design. Tone operates on a finer level in this case to distinguish groupings, such as the headline text from the body text, and to dim the images in the background from the shapes in the foreground. We can also see tone working in alongside scale in the instance of the "Achievement" descriptions, where the larger sized label and brighter tone enhance the pop out effect.

Blizzard has also chosen to make use of color to section parts of the screen. The hierarchy consists of a blue-tinted mission objective segment at the top, a green tinted achievements segment at the bottom right, and a red-tinted summary portion in the bottom right. This element, paired with the rectangle shapes literally divide the high-resolution image into smaller chunks to be more readily understood.


Color and tone can be seen working in conjunction in the finer elements. Such instances include the contrasting orange icons functioning as bullets to the side of the achievement descriptors, and the blue-background dots to help anti-alias the numerals on the far right of the mission summary section. Each dialogue has  a header or footer that's tinted to further enhance the communication of the template.

Basic Elements

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