DesignTo see anything at all, something in the frame has to lose.
Figure/ground is the eye's first decision: what to seize as the object and what to discard as backdrop. The choice is unstable — Rubin's vase flips between a goblet and two profiles, and the harder you stare, the faster it switches, because the brain refuses to hold both readings at once.
Figure/ground is a Gestalt principle of perception describing how the visual system separates a scene into a focal object, the figure, and its surrounding background, the ground. The relationship can be stable or ambiguous, as in reversible images like Rubin's vase, where figure and ground compete for the viewer's attention.
