ITAP - Week five

This weeks lecture was basically all about the sense behind design, i.e the reasons why designers make images them look the way that they do. The two principles I have decided to look at are Legibility and Visual Hierarchy. I'm going to start with some definitions.
Visual Hierarchy is the order in which you see certain aspects of a design. This isn't just for editorial design, it is the same principle with any type of design, whether it be 3D or photography. For example, a magazine page with a large, brightly coloured title, you're eyes would be drawn towards the title and you would see this first. 
Legibility describes how well you can read the text. This can depend on many aspects such as the colour, font, size and alignment. There are many rules you have to stick to to maintain maximum legibility. One is that you should never put more then 10-15 words on a line, unless you choose to do this deliberately for design purposes. Another is that you should never put words over an image if you want them to be read carefully and actually taken in. With that, I'm going to look the David Carson. 

David Carson is a famous typographer who seems to break all the rules of structured graphic design. His work is known and recognized for its irregular, maybe described as chaotic form. Carson  keeps symmetry in his work by twisting the rules of graphics and putting his own twist on legibility. He does this in many ways, playing around with many different aspects of the type such as size, direction and font. He takes words apart and moves them around making it hard for the human eye to register what is going on and be able to read sense from his work. Some of his pieces are more legible than others depending on the audience and purpose. His works of art tend to be less legible than work that is to be published for a purpose as they are designed to be seen as an image rather than text. Another twist Carson puts in his work is making imagery from text, making the text used to construct the image completely illegible but it is an interesting design feature and can make an image much more interesting on the eye.
Here is an example of Carson's work that really inspires me. 

This is a magazine spread he has designed for what looks like some sort of art's magazine. As you can see a lot of the text is illegible and the readability is very poor. You can see on the right hand page where here was a 3 column grid structure to begin with but Carson has broken the grid and put his own twist on this. There is text overlapping both text and image. This work would be very difficult to gain information from and therefore would be no good for an informative purpose. As a work of art/design on the other hand, this piece is very interesting to look at. There is so much going on your eyes can't settle on anything in particular. There isn't really much of a hierarchy going on as everything is overlapping and making the piece very confusing. It's the little traits like that that people recognize Carson's work. 

Visual Hierarchy is very important in all types of design. When people think of Hierarchy they think of the history of royalty and how there is a hierarchy of class, starting with peasants and working up to the king. This is the same principle in design, the king would be the first thing you're eyes see, and the peasants would be the last. Here is a CD cover design from an event that I like. I have been influenced by designs for this event in my work in the past. The first thing I see when you look at this is the image in the middle with the large 'W'. My eyes are then drawn straight to the the word 'Warning' and then they follow down through the text as is shrinks in size. This shows the designer has used Visual Hierarchy in order to get me to see the important parts of the design first. Informative flyers and magazines are strong evidence of the importance of Visual Hierarchy in the publishing world today.