Summary of chapter 12 of visual design solutions

  We always have a visual attention when we received a lot of sensory information from a visual design that we will be influenced and guided imperceptibly by visual cues like arrows, colorful borders or spotlights inside.

  Actually, visual cues play a dominant role on establishing a visual hierarchy that appropriate visual cues can easily draw viewers’ attention to controlling where they look on a graphic and promote the efficiency of learning process by improving the speed of finding important information when they need look through relative illustrations or charts. For example, learners can quickly pay attention to the important areas pointed by arrows or highlighted by bright colors on an illustration comparing to other places with no visual cues.

  If a passenger asked you where the nearest restroom is and how to find it, you would always use your finger to point the right direction for him or her. Similarly, you can choose directional visual cues like pointing hands, arrows or shapes to point out useful tips or specific instructional areas for guiding or reminding and you can even add extra numbers to make it more clear.

  “When a bright color is used as a signal of importance, it helps viewers filter out extraneous information and shows them where to place their attention.” (page 219) So using bright colors like yellow and red to highlight important areas or place prominent texts on a colorful background can quickly gather viewers’ focus. Because almost eight percentage of males have blindness inability on distinguishing red and green, so do not require viewers to distinct these two colors closely if not necessary. In addition, you can also use bright spotlight to stand particular areas out of a graphic to reinforce emphasis though it’s not a common idea.

  Beside directional visual cues and color cues, you can also use typographic cues such as large, bold, italic or colored texts to provide a hierarchy of importance for viewers. And putting a person image with directional gaze to something besides important areas of a graphic is an effective way to lead viewers’ eyesight because the eye gaze sometimes can compel viewers to look in the direction of the gaze. (page 227)

  Usually, you can choose these different types of visual cues to suit your different needs to make the visual design more readable and understandable, but remember to avoid using too many visual cues in a design which may confuse viewers and pay attention to unintentional visual cue like using outstanding color for border of a nonsignificant picture to mislead viewers’ eyes. It’s also important to use same visual cues for similar contents to avoid misunderstanding that you cannot use red color for normal contents if you have decided to use it for emphasizing caution items on a graphic.