Visual Organization!

*Not directing the audience through a design is misdirecting them!

Clean, simple, and clear!

-Eye movement: (The typical eye moves left to right and top to bottom in American Culture)

• Controlling eye movement within a composition is a matter of directing the natural scanning tendency of the viewer's eye
• light areas of a composition will attract the eye, especially when adjacent to a dark area
• the eye moves to complex areas first
• Diagonal lines or edges will guide eye movement
• Effective page design maps a viewer's route through the information
• The designer's objective is to lead the viewer's eye to the important elements of information

-Optical Center: The spot where the human eye tends to enter the page-- optical center is slightly above mathematical (or exact) center and just to the left

-Z Pattern: Our visual pattern makes a sweep of the page, generally in the shape of a "Z"; how we navigate naturally through a composition/page

**("Fine print" text often at bottom right, but the important stuff should be in optical center)

-Fonts:

• Guidelines

1. No more than two fonts total in a single composition; make sure the fonts complicate one another (like a fancy header with a simple body text)

2. Avoid all uppercase; use sparingly, like for a headliner, or a single word

3. Choose the right font; make sure it fits the theme and the tone of your design

4. Do not overuse fancy or complicated fonts (not as body text)

-Pairing fonts: www.typography.com/email/2010-03/index.htm

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Visual Hierarchy

-Will establish focal points based on their importance to the message that's being communicated

-Crucial part of the design process:

Establish an order of elements--a visual structure--to help the viewer absorb the information provided by a design

Ask yourself the following...

1. What do I want my viewer to look at first (2nd, 3rd, ...)? The visual or company name, with referring to logos

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The Grid
-A way of organizing content on a page using any combination of margins, guide lines, rows and columns
*Aligning things, sometimes with something breaking out of the grid


-Instituted by modernism: simplified and modern, clean


-can assist the audience by breaking information into manageable chunks and establishing relationships between text and images


-A grid consists of a distinct set of alignment-based relationships that act as guides for distributing elements across a format (like text, headlines, photos, etc..)
   *Every design is different; therefore, every design will require a different grid structure       (one that addresses the particular elements within the design)
   *Used to help clarify the message being communicated and to unify the elements