The Joy of Illusion
Optical illusions can be puzzling, amusing and headache-inducing (often all at the same time). Theories on how they work have been expounded on since the time of the Ancient Greeks, with philosopher Aristotle noticing that when you look at a waterfall and then shifted your gaze to static rocks nearby, it appeared as though the rocks were moving in the opposite direction than the waterfall. Since then, many people have tried to pin down exactly how they work. Is it the eye or the brain that is being tricked?
I, for one, am not too bothered about the why and the how. I just know that I love spotting them on the cover of a book.
It's easy to see why designers like to use them. Images that delight us are more memorable, they stay with us, we tell our friends about them. They can also offer a clever way to include an extra layer of depth.
Cover designer David Drummond is a fan of using optical illusions and says this about his practice: "For a lot of my cover designs I try and express an idea with a visual twist where there is another dimension added to the image. A common object or familiar image is subverted and takes on a new meaning.”
Since a book cover is a finite space, there's only so much room to include information about the type of story you're about to read. Visual trickery grants the chance to include extra details, a kind of two for one deal. Let's take The Boy with the Tiger's Heart as an example. The image contains so much information. The way designer Levente Szabo weaves the image of the children and the wilderness into the illusion of a tiger's face means that he can show multiple elements of the story all at once, without over-crowding the space.
Design: Levente Szabo
Some illusions are more obvious than others but whether you catch them right away or not, they never fail to provide a little thrill when you do detect an element hiding in plain sight.
See if you can spot the hidden visual delights in the following examples of great optical illusions.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.