å Monday, November 9th, 2015

The reading showed that everything deserves a purpose, even the way words are grouped on a page. Everything you see is influential and this benefits a graphic designer but they need to know how to use it. Using hierarchy in your work makes it interesting for the eye, even if they are small changes such as placement, size, or color. These changes enhance and can make a message come off clearer or greater then intended.

Reading this article helped me clarify the meaning of hierarchy. I never thought that deep into the layout of things and how a certain advertisement reads and the organization of it. Once I read this article I decided to take a look into things like magazines, advertisements, and even the label on my lotion bottle. I quickly noticed how the designer of the product wants you to read the label, things that are most important and they want you to read first are the biggest, and the least important information is in the smallest point font. The designers work through the layout to pull your eyes around the way they want them too, they take the time to create a layout that will work best for what you are trying to get across to the viewer.

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When the article started with information about the design of table of contents I had to think about how often I had looked across leader lines to get to the page number of a specific chapter. It finally struck me as annoying once the example of the more modern table of contents was shown. Type should be something thats easy to look at and not be an annoyance or a strain to the eye. The dimensional hierarchy also struck me as interesting. I was amazed to see that there are companies that are willing to have important product information subordinate their logo or name. The design in turn looks more distinguishable and their company will be associated with the hierarchy of the package rather than the actual product logo. It just goes to show that the accessibility of important information and visual communication is one of the most important aspects of design.

I would have never related type to hierarchy before reading this article but now the idea of order of importance makes perfect sense in relation to this. By using different scales and styles in type, it shows the viewer what they should be paying attention to and where their eyes should be going to see the most important parts of the piece. If the piece is poorly designed and doesnt include different scales or styles or good placement, the viewer can get confused and the piece can fail. It’s also important to keep in mind not to go over the top with scales and style and to keep it to a minimum or else it could be even more confusing than not including them at all. I really enjoyed the page that showed the series of iconic snacks with the stripped down hierarchy that displayed the architecture of the snacks. The designs were so simple but modern looking.

I really enjoyed this reading and it really helped me clarify hierarchy in text. In the beginning I really thought this exercise was monotonous, but after doing more with it and reading this excerpt, I had more respect for it. As a person who wants to work for magazines in the future, text hierarchy is super important. The covers of magazines are what catch your eye along with what headlines are emphasizes and placed. I loved the examples of the menus, I thought they were beautiful and innovative. I find it quite an art form how text can be arranged and changed in ways to manipulate the viewer’s eye. Sometimes, the text still needs to be readable which can impose an issue if you want to make it in this intricate way. It’s really crazy to think how much power a graphic designer has over their work. Back to my magazine example, many just carelessly see the fact the headlines are there, but they were put there for a reason by a designer.

I thought this reading was very interesting. Hierarchy never really became consciously aware to me until we started talking about it in this class. I’ve always noticed it in design work before or in drawings of my own, but I never really noticed that I was doing it or that I was classifying one object with a higher importance than another. Hierarchy is extremely important because it establishes to the viewer, the audience, the client, or whoever is examining the design the order of importance of the information in the design. I’m beginning to notice more and more throughout the course of this class that design work is not necessarily so much about the actual artistry and the beauty of a piece, but more about the clarity of the image. There is more to say about simplicity because there is more readability, and that’s something the reading touches upon. Scale and style of the fonts are extremely important because they determine whether or not the design can get the point across to the viewer. This being said, I’ve also realized through this project just how difficult it can be to achieve simplicity and readability within a design. They will make or break the design, but they can also make or break the designer depending on how much time and effort the design requires.

This article was very interesting to me because it compared hierarchy in the mid-evil days to hierarchy in graphic design. It explained how hierarchy back then described a basic ranking system in which a king was the highest and the peasants were the lowest and hierarchy in graphic design separates the more important text from the least important. This example really helped me grasp the concept of hierarchy in graphic design and now I am definitely going to look at the layout of text differently when thinking about that.