We are born into the world of shapes. Growing up we learn how to read them, and how to translate visual images into the information we need. We share the world of shapes with other creatures, think in its terms, and communicate. We become visually literate as well as verbally literate. We learn how to recognize the pictorial code, how to understand it's culturally determined language. We can read signs on the post, maps, and pictures, navigating with their help in the surrounding environment.
In visual media shapes can be made in a number of ways. They may be defined as the outlines of objects, or they may be composed from parts of different adjacent objects; they can exist as gaps, or negative shapes between the objects.
Reading shapes, we tend to dissect them into simpler forms based on geometrical units. Most people can immediately perceive the total area of a circle, a square, a triangle, an oval, or a rhombus, without difficulty. If we were shown an image for a couple of seconds, we probably would not be able to remember it in all the details, but we would have a general grasp of it's basic form. If we look at a typical children's drawing we would see the circle of the sun, and the squares of the houses, or the ovals of peoples faces.
We can say that the geometric basis of shapes provides us with an elementary vocabulary, an alphabet of the shape language. It helps us to dissect, analyze, and structure the world.
Besides that intellectual perception, restricting our view of the outside world to things of practical interest and immediate necessity, we have a spontaneous vision of shape, the capacity to be surprised, enchanted, or impressed by it's visual phenomena. We respond to them emotionally. They hold for us their own expressive meaning and character. If to return to the children's drawing, it won't be far fetched to say that we all read the circle of the sun as warmth and protection, as the best signifier of repose. It is continuity comforting to our eyes. The same feelings are associated with all kinds of curvy forms. They seem calm, pacific, assured, sensuously relaxed, and optimistic.
The square can be read as dull, straight forward, honest, lacking imagination (though not always), stable, less natural than the circle.
Different shapes tell us different stories. The endless variations and interplays are stimulating our curiosity constantly. The sensory perception of shape is probably connected with the deepest levels of our perception of the world. It is universal, and can be understood beyond the limits of the cultural identity. If cultivated, it can become our window to another culture. One of the ways of it's training is through the arts. Artists play with the perception of shape. Different styles emphasizes different capacities.
For example Matisse, reducing all the details to the minimum, was trying to unfold the purest forms, and give us immediate sensations of visual excitement. He wished that the viewer would see shapes, as shapes in their entirety, and enjoy them that way.
In the same way the connection between shapes and our emotions is utilized in the advertising industry. The use of basic shapes, and their appeal, is most obvious in perfume ads. Perfume is trying to bottle essential emotions such as attraction and sensuality. Women's ads tend to use all three shapes, thereby portraying how, according to society, women are more emotional and subject to a greater variety of feelings. The bottles that hold women's perfume are generally more oriented to curvy, circular, and triangular shapes. The curves may be reflecting the actual body, but it also implies a feeling of warmth, continuity, and security. The triangular bottle implies risk, challenge, and excitement. The bottles that tend to hold cologne are generally square in shape. They are bigger and appear more solid. This shape implies strength, honesty and reliability. They are not as alluring and enticing as women's bottles. The shapes perfectly portray the stereotypes that women and men hold in our society, true or not.
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