Toward a Better Understanding and Application of the Principles of Visual Communication

Abstract

Graphic designers have excelled at conveying visual messages for decades. We take their work for granted: the back of a Wheaties box, an informative poster, a newspaper front page (Fig. 1), slides and web pages. One of graphic design’s primary goals is to create a “visual hierarchy” that gives structure to text and imagery, and improves viewer understanding. However, while graphic design methods have clearly been successful, there has been little work examining the reasons for that success, and few tools that help users apply those methods well. This is particularly surprising when we consider the ubiquity and indeed importance of this sort of visual communication in our lives. In this chapter, we lay the foundations for a research agenda that begins addressing these problems. We begin with a review of related research. In psychology, the Gestalt laws of visual grouping are clearly fundamental to the communication of knowledge structure, however little is known about how Gestalt laws work together to create complex hierarchies. Obviously design practice has a great deal to tell us, but the accepted theory of visual hierarchy is quite limited. We also examine pertinent research in human-computer interfaces and information visualization, especially of any related tools. We then propose a paradigm for studying the effective communication of complex visual structure, including possible measures of such effectiveness, and our own initial work along those lines. We conclude by discussing open questions in this line of research.