The magic of a tray

One of my favorite books I read in 2016 is an interior design book named Styled: Secretes for Arranging Rooms from Tabletops to Bookshelves by Emily Henderson. The book is teeming with beautiful photos and amazing tips that can transform any space from boring to sophisticated. In this book, Emily encourages her readers to use a tray to hold small objects together. I tried, and it worked! Just look at how pulled-together my vanity looked after following this tip. And I can't help but wonder: what a magical tray!

Interestingly, I came across something very similar while reading on a seemingly unrelated topic, web design, this time. In their book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, Jason Beaird and James George talk about the concept of proximity when considering the composition of a web page. It's a pretty intuitive idea: in a composition, objects that are close to each other tend to be interpreted as a single unit by the viewer.  

The proximity concept reminded me of the tray tip. Essentially, a tray unites individual items and place them in proximity of each other.

Two similar things should make a pattern. My mind just couldn't resist the attempt to sort these two out when I spotted them. So why do they both work? And in a very familiar way? Then almost immediately my brain pulled up something I read way back when, well, ten years ago to be exact. At the time, I was looking into the effectiveness of a bunch of wind data visualization techniques and happened to be reading about a visual perception theory, Gestalt theory.  

According to Wikipedia, Gestalt theory suggests that the our minds tend to organize items as groups rather than treating individual items as separate units. When navigation links are placed right next to each other, they are viewed as a navigation section for a web page and are easy found and remembered by its users. Likewise, when the knickknacks on my vanity were corralled with a tray, they transformed into a thoughtful vignette that sparks joy every time I lay my eyes on it. 

All of a sudden, a ton of other design practices started to make more sense. For example, an area rug in the center of a living room creates a focal point because it pulls pieces of furniture into proximity of each other while they would otherwise look disconnected. The area rug should be big enough to have at least the front legs of the sofa and chairs rest on it if not all. A too small of a rug violates the law of proximity. As a result, the space will look discordant. 

Leveraging the theory, I had fun adapting the tray suggestion when styling several niches of my home. When styling my nightstand, I was confronted with the lack of a suitable sized tray. So I repurposed a piece of batik fabric from my home province as a "tray". And I'm pretty happy with the results.

I hope that my babbling so far may have started to convince you that Gestalt theory is beautiful. You see, theories can be wonderful. They explain why things work. They give you a framework to think about things and plan your actions accordingly. Instead of picking up on the individual pieces, they can help you connect the dots and form a deeper understanding of the world we live in.

Now, I'm a little sad. Because the tray doesn't seem as magical as it had first appeared. Nevertheless, I'm happy to have come to know its beauty and I'll never quit using it!