02 · Seeing
Law of Proximity
Things that sit close together look like they belong together.
Evidence: Holds upWhat we do with it
- 01
Space is the cheapest way to group things. Try it before you reach for boxes and lines.
- 02
Put a label right next to the thing it names, and farther from everything else.
- 03
If two items are related, the gap between them should be one of the smallest on the screen.
Examples
Getting it wrong, getting it right.
Don't
A form with the same 24 pixels above and below every field. Each label floats halfway between two inputs, and people type into the wrong one.
Do
Each label sits 4 pixels above its own field, with 24 between one field and the next label. The pairs read at a glance.
The evidence
What the research says.
One of the best-tested ideas in perception. Michael Kubovy and Johan Wagemans measured it in 1995 with grids of dots, and with Alex Holcombe in 1998 showed the rule behind it: how strongly people group dots along one direction falls off with the relative distance between them, on one curve, closely enough to predict. It carries over to screens. In Marketta Niemelä and Jukka Saarinen's 2000 study, people found a target icon faster when the icons on screen were grouped.
Sources
- Wertheimer, M. (1923). Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt II. Psychologische Forschung, 4.
- Kubovy, M., & Wagemans, J. (1995). Grouping by proximity and multistability in dot lattices: A quantitative Gestalt theory. Psychological Science, 6(4).
- Kubovy, M., Holcombe, A. O., & Wagemans, J. (1998). On the lawfulness of grouping by proximity. Cognitive Psychology, 35(1).
- Niemelä, M., & Saarinen, J. (2000). Visual search for grouped versus ungrouped icons in a computer interface. Human Factors, 42(4).
- Wagemans, J., Elder, J. H., Kubovy, M., Palmer, S. E., Peterson, M. A., Singh, M., & von der Heydt, R. (2012). A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: I. Perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6).
Last reviewed November 7, 2026. How we keep this current