Pick up a newspaper – any format, from broadsheet to tabloid – and before you’ve read one word, your eye will have already been led from a single word or headline through a photograph, over a standfirst and on to one or more summaries of stories at the edges of the page. It’s not because you decided to look there first. It’s because the page is set up in such a way as to show you what needs reading before everything else. This is a visual hierarchy. Newspaper designers have spent longer honing it than anyone – and done so most ruthlessly.
The way that a typical front page of a newspaper looks today is not just familiar. It has actually solved a problem. And after decades of refinement driven by reader research and commercial pressure, that format guides the eye with precision. The size and weight of every element contrasts with those adjacent to it; each placement decision is made to address both space and attention.
Web designers have the same tools at their disposal: scale, contrast, whitespace, colour and typography form much of their vocabulary. But while the blank canvas starts the same, the finished page is often different. A lack of hierarchy means everything competes against each other, creating a mess of equal but in the end meaningless components, each shouting for the eye’s attention. For Web Design Cardiff, contact https://www.accent-adc.co.uk/service/web-design-cardiff/
And that was worked out a hundred years ago on newspaper fronts.
It’s tempting to think that the lesson here is ‘print’. However, the real take-home is clarity: the simple fact that any decent design needs to decide on behalf of the reader. In short, the best websites do exactly what the best front pages do: tell us exactly where to look first.
