干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

"Seeing is believing" means what a person sees with his own eyes is true. Actually, this saying is not entirely correct. Confucius once said: "What a person knows sources from what he sees or hears, but all these are always not the essences of things". That is to say, the things people often see are deceptive to some extent because of visual misconception just like the mirage people see in the desert. This case is referred to as visual illusion. In fact, visual illusion has been widely used in the daily life, especially in the field of the modem art. In this paper, the formation of visual illusion as well as its formation conditions is analyzed, and the application of visual illusion to graphic design is discussed.