Visual hierarchy is the way you arrange and organize the elements of your design to convey a message, guide attention, and create a visual impact. It is a crucial skill for communication design, as it helps you to communicate effectively and efficiently with your audience. In this article, you will learn how to analyze visual hierarchy to improve your communication design.
Visual hierarchy is the principle that some elements in a design are more important, noticeable, or influential than others. It is based on the idea that humans perceive and process information in a certain order, depending on factors such as size, color, contrast, alignment, proximity, and shape. By using these factors, you can create a visual hierarchy that directs your audience's attention, highlights your main message, and enhances your design's aesthetics.
For example, in a poster promoting a music festival, using a larger, bold font for the event's headline grabs attention, setting the main message as a focal point. Contrasting colors and appropriate alignment can help emphasize key details like dates and location. Smaller, supporting information, like performers and sponsors, can be presented in a visually distinct but subordinate manner, maintaining the overall hierarchy and aiding audience comprehension.
Visual hierarchy is important for communication design because it helps you to achieve your design goals and objectives. For example, if you want to inform, persuade, or entertain your audience, you need to make sure that they can easily understand and remember your message. Visual hierarchy helps you to do that by creating a clear and logical structure, reducing clutter and confusion, and emphasizing the most relevant and valuable information. Visual hierarchy also helps you to create a positive impression and a strong identity, as it reflects your style, tone, and personality.
Visual hierarchy is important because it helps your audience understand the order in which information should be digested. This ensures direct and clear communication. Design is a form of asynchronous communication, meaning it exists outside of a steady stream. It is not the same as have a synchronous back-and-forth conversation with someone. However, design is still intended to communicate information. To do this most effectively, emphasize the most valuable information through visual hierarchy.
To analyze visual hierarchy, you need to evaluate how well your design elements work together to create a coherent and effective message. Start by identifying your design purpose and audience, and then review the main components of your design, such as text, images, icons, logos, etc. Assess how you use factors such as size, color, contrast, alignment, proximity, and shape to influence visual hierarchy. Finally, evaluate your design outcome to see if it conveys your message, guides attention, creates a visual impact, meets your criteria and expectations, and compares to other designs.
Let's consider a website design for an online learning platform targeting students. The purpose is to provide an intuitive interface for course selection. The main components include the course titles (text), subject-related images, and a logo. Utilizing size to emphasize course titles, contrasting colors for call-to-action buttons, and alignment to create a logical flow, the design effectively guides the audience's attention. Proximity groups related elements, like course titles and descriptions, enhancing comprehension. Shapes and visuals are used to convey the academic theme. Evaluating the design outcome ensures it effectively conveys the platform's purpose and visually engages the target audience.
To improve visual hierarchy, you should apply the best practices and principles of communication design to your design elements and factors. You can use size to show importance and hierarchy, with the most important elements larger and more prominent. Additionally, color can be used to create contrast and harmony, while contrast between light and dark, warm and cool, and saturated and desaturated colors helps make elements stand out. Alignment should be used to create order and alignment, while proximity should be used to create relationships and groups. Finally, shape can be used to create variety and interest with different shapes such as circles, squares, triangles, and curves.
Testing visual hierarchy requires feedback and insights from your audience and yourself. The squint test can help you determine what elements are most noticeable and if they effectively convey your message. The five-second test can show you what elements people recall after a short glance. Lastly, the heatmap test can help you pinpoint the areas that get the most attention and interaction. Each of these tests should help you achieve your design goals and objectives.