Following up on yesterday’s post regarding Gestalt theory in advertising design and layout, the attached photo image is from www.gregslater.com, the photographer’s website where it presently resides. I chose this one as I had seen it recently on
the back cover of a Taschen advertising collection, but also because it is for a truly global brand – one of the biggest, most pervasive, did ya know? – and with virtually no ad copy it communicates its message well.
Deconstructing it a bit … closure is perhaps the most obvious of gestalt psychology examples here. In popular culture today we’re familiar with, for example, photographs that are cropped so that, say, the entire person or subject is not within the frame, but yet our eyes seem to see it all. This has also been used in outdoor billboard situations you’ve seen where “Coca-Cola†in its trademarked script is so large that the billboard only holds part of it, but in your mind’s eye you know very well it says “Coca-Cola,†yet it’s not been reduced to a smaller size (less impactful) to fit on the billboard. Your mind does the rest.
So in this ad, you see the snowflake, even though it’s not a snowflake, of course, but an arrangement of bottles. It also helps that you see other duplications of this pattern on the page in varying sizes, some even blurred in the background, which further brings to mind a view of snowflakes falling. Further, this ad’s use of a figure-ground, guiding the eye immediately to the snowflake large in the center, while allowing the peripheral information of the other snowflakes and against the white background complete the thought visually.
What are also noteworthy here are the patterns of similarity, in that all of the bottles are precisely the same image, but represented in different sizes, angles and patterns (snowflakes) to communicate the message. This is of particular importance for a couple of reasons. First, the Coca-Cola bottle image used here is the iconic glass bottle shape that represents classic Coca-Cola heritage, and for many audiences this will call to mind, for example, the beverage from their childhood, particularly in context of the snowflakes and the date “12.25†which makes it a Christmas holiday greeting. Secondly, it serves to remind us of just how distinctive this bottle shape/form is – it’s almost instantly recognizable as Coca-Cola. And that use of similarity in packaging wherever Coke is sold around the world has been a major contributor to the massive strength of its brand recognition. “The Coca-Cola brand image is instantly recognizable, the local specificity is also immediately clear … No wonder that the journal Business Week has identified Coca-Cola as the world’s number one brand†(Strategic Direction Journal 2006: 27-29).
What’s it all mean? All wrapped up into a one-page advert, this one “says†little more than the product name and a date. What it communicates, however, via Gestalt psychology and expert attention to principles of closure, similarity and figure-ground, is holiday cheer and good wishes. With respect to semiotics, I believe a large appeal of all this is its classic, almost 1950’s feeling, harkening back to a simpler, more peaceful time in American history – a time when kids might hopscotch down to the corner drugstore for a refreshing bottle of Coke, and maybe catch some snowflakes on their tongues along the way.
Posted by: Colin Mangham