Aesthetic Science: Understanding Preferences for Color...

Google Tech Talks May 22, 2007 ABSTRACT Artists and graphic designers of all stripes continually face the problem of how to compose their works in aesthetically pleasing ways. Despite its importance and generality, the perceptual basis of aesthetic response has not been adequately studied. I will report the results of three projects that investigate people's aesthetic responses to spatial and color composition. Our results show strong, consistent preferences in the spatial composition of simple images containing familiar objects and configurations of objects in rectangular frames to be positioned at or near the center of the frame (the "center bias") and to face toward the center of the frame...