Summary of chapter 8&9

  As the primary part of a successful visual design, clear hierarchy structure plays a prominent role on attracting viewers by outstanding a focal point and conveying significant meaning by arranging various components in visual sequence.

  Designers should consider how to establish an uncluttered visual hierarchy in the forefront. In this case, they should be clear about the instructional or informational targets of their design and what they want audience to see or understand first on screen or a slide. Then turns to the specific texts or visual segments, they need to consider which component can really help audience see what they want to see and how to arrange visual sequence of different sections to interact with audience.

  After thinking above deliberately, designers need know some effective ways to highlight or stand out what they want to show audience first. They can use a vivid image with appropriate decoration to draw audience’s attention directly if the image could convey enough information. If It’s impossible to use an image or placing it in center, they can fill bright colors in important area or enlarge size of relative elements to leap them out of the view. And isolating objects with sufficient space, grouping them in a high density and using visual cues such as conspicuous numbers and powerful phrases are all benefit for emphasizing important information.

  But it’s not enough to just highlight important segments because a visual hierarchy also need present other subordinate information such as specific text contents to create a consistent visual view. For a hierarchy of type, besides enlarging text size and changing font color, designers can divide a long text into short pieces and placing them on a contrast background to facilitate reading. And designers can also use contrasting typeface and rules, add enough empty space around text and place a quote outside of the text block to stand text content out. As a prevalent way to identify and highlight a paragraph, “drop cap” can be really useful in attracting readers’ view.

  Well, it’s time to think about how to arrange these segments in comfortable ways to form a harmony unity in addition to make them in a hierarchy because people always prefer perceiving the whole entity of a design than particular highlighting inside.

  “With unity, all the elements in the design are working toward one common goal. Not only is this aesthetically pleasing, but the consistency of a unified visual experience.” (page 173) A harmony unity view of design can help viewers reduce cognitive effort, create a focused message and improve the aesthetic experience. Actually, it’s a particular way to highlight some important points in a whole view comparing to separate ways dedicated for specific segments.

  One of the most effective ways to achieve the unity is repetition which means to repeat some visual features in a slide or a set of slides to form a unified design style. For example, designers can use italic or bold characters to highlight the title of text; use same shape or color for dominant elements; use same borders to decorate images; and use same layout for consistent slides.

  Of course, designers can’t repeat too many visual features in a design otherwise it will influence the visual hierarchy. In this case, they can do some small change on those features to make it a little different with others such as selecting similar colors and using similar decorations to decorate images. Sometimes using implied lines to separate different style of elements is another way for highlighting and conveying deeper meaning.