An Exercise in Gestalt

A friend and I were going over one of his recent business card designs, and I made a comment about how grouping and spacing affects the way elements on the page are perceived. He asked for clarification, and I said:

This is three dots:

    o   o   o

...but this is a story:

    o o     o

A little gestalt goes a long way :-) I'm sure I got this from somewhere, probably Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. Tufte has a lot to say about these kinds of relationships also, though a specific citation eludes me at the moment.

UPDATE: If you're scratching your head thinking that the dots look exactly the same, it's because your RSS reader is messing up the formatting of the text. Sigh.