Illusion (or hallucination?)

Tushar Nankani

As I write this, it gets me feeling philosphical as if I will write about the illusions in life — like how time is relatively illusive or that life is longer than we think it is.

I am afraid I am not going to drop more bombs. I will tell about a straight-forward illusion I came across when I was building a cover for blurrit.

Context

I love playing with Typography and other minor details. I love it even more when people are able to identify them.

A few examples subtle flex.

  • Second segment for landing page of Aankh.
    • Typography for Powerful & Lightweight features.

Second segment for landing page of Aankh

A snippet from the slides of Fundamental Design Principles

  • A snippet of the cover of blurrit.
    • safe is bold, safer is bolder.

A snippet from the cover of blurrit

But wait, where is the illusion I was going to speak about? (Sorry, I get distracted when I start speaking about things I am passionate about.)

Here is the previous attempt before I finalised the cover of blurrit.

A snippet from the previous cover of blurrit

Reason for not going with this was because blurring 'safe' was making it look untidy and blurring the logo was already serving the purpose.

Now, when I was comparing the two, I noticed something.

A snippet of the differences of blurrit covers

Please zoom in to compare.

Do you see any difference? (Apart from safe.)

Hopefully, you'll see a difference in background gradient. (Or you have a brilliant vision.)

But, I haven't made any changes.

Now, let's swap the images.

A swapped snippet of the differences of blurrit covers

I promise, I have just swapped the images.

Don't believe me? Here's another one to confuse help you.

A swapped snippet of the differences of blurrit covers

The diagonal ones are the same. Yet they feel different in comparison to the first one.

This is a very famous optical illusion. Also, called the color gradient illusion. But is it common sense?

Relativity plays a major role in most of the optical illusions. Decieving the perception of your conveniently inter-wired retinal and brain cells is crucial in illusions like the Ponzo illusion.

In this case, we tend to compare the right side (lighter) of the first one with the left side of the second picture.

Hence, in comparison, the blue appears to be lighter in the first one and the black appears to be darker in the second one.

A swapped interswapped snippet of the differences of blurrit covers

Interestingly, the conclusion to my every experience remains the same: Zoom out.