Design Principles: Type Hierarchy

In todays lecture we began by looking at the 'the quick brown fox' that we experimented with over the week and noticed that it doesn't have to be in order for it to read correctly. Equally certain pieces of type caught your eye first. We began to play around with this when looking at newspaper typography and how the layout draws your eye to certain aspects first.



The example to the right shows how your eyes follow a path. First thing you see is the title "food allergies 'kill fewer people than murderers'" then your eye is attracted down to the image. After that it is led across to the small story on the right. This leads nicely onto the cleverly placed advert where the cheapest British Gas deal is placed. As your eye follows it to the left it gets more expensive but ends on the larger word "FREE" which cancels out the worry of the cost. Then before you can find out about the costs in the small print your eye is dragged up to the small story in the top left corner.









Below shows the deconstructing of a newspaper page, removing what catches your one at a time. However the images shouldn't have been included but this brings up the dilemma that images are the first think you look at. Below shows the 6 steps and the order in which everything is viewed. Interestingly the bulk copy is last which implies everything else makes up your mind about whether you want to read the story rather than the story itself.

Here shows the order (left down, then right down) to how it was read. As you can see  images and text which is more spread attracts the eye first because it is easier to read and grasp an idea of what the story is about without having to actually read it.

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I tried to do the same thing again but including the adverts and imagery. The thing I liked about this page spread was the clever title paired with the car advert. 

Here is the final order of the advert. The first thing that caught my eye was the title which then led me to the image, I automatically skipped to the advert. When I read the text the first thing that stood out was bold 3rd column of questions and answers. The rest of the body text followed. None of it stood out.


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When I first looked at this page spread I was overwhelmed with information, my eyes automatically went to the title in the bold impact title. After this they went straight to the image that was actually part of a different story. From this they followed down to the brightly coloured advert and then to the text.