To understand esthetic experience, this essay suggests it may again be useful to regard the two terms as antonyms. Using examples of visual art and design, it is shown that the perceptual organizing principles or unit forming factors (similarity, proximity, continuity, and closure), proposed in 1923 by the Gestalt psychologists, are still in widespread use today among artists and designers, in the design of esthetic arrangments for books, magazines, typefaces, posters, and so on.