Visual Heirarcy and Mind Motion in Printed Advertising - Research Paper Example

Gestalt psychological theory is the basis upon which the concept of hierarchy is construed. This 20th century German theory recommends that the human intellect has an instinctive organizing propensity that “structure individual elements, shapes or forms into a coherent, organized whole” (Ian, 2008, p.256). The word Gestalt in English means “form,” “shape,” or “pattern” (Rune, 2010). Ideally, when a visual component set its self apart from the ‘whole’ shaped by a person’s intellect perceptual organization, it becomes very conspicuous in the eye of the observer.

Usually, the shapes that are the most conspicuous are those that highly set themselves apart from their surroundings and identified by the viewer through mind motion. As a matter of fact, the human brain uses distinctive physical characteristics to differentiate objects from others. These characteristics can be categorized into four aspects including character, alignment, size and color. The aspect of color, which perceives texture, includes saturation, hue, and value. Size explains the surface area of a structure while alignment is the aspect that describes the array of structures with regards to their orientation, direction, or pattern (Feldsted, 1950).

Character is the curvilinearity and rectilinearity of structures. In view of this, a distinction between structures can be drawn from the differences in these characteristics. . ar is organized with respect to the significance of each concept, the visual hierarchy in print advertisement is organized in a similar manner (Groeger, 2002). Visual hierarchy is one of the most significant concepts behind effective print advertisements. This paper will study why developing a visual hierarchy and mind motion is important when designing a poster, the theory behind it, and how the very principles can be used to put these concepts into practice.

Design is equal to communication The basic idea behind a print design is visual communication. As such, an effective advert designer should able to evidently communicate their thoughts to the audience failures to which they can lose their attention. Interestingly, most people are visual thinkers rather than data processors, and that is why they do not pay attention to huge blocks of information. This happens because people categorize what they see based on “visual relationships”, instead of taking visual information and processing it uniformly.

In the above illustration, chances are that a certain person may fail to notice the two circles but rather notice one red circle and one black circle. The reason why this happens is because, when a person is presented with simple things like two circles, they tend to find a way of differentiating them rather than just observing the two circles. Therefore, people use such differences to make a distinction between objects at attach unique meanings to them. In the above figure, since the level of complexity has been increased, the viewer’s desire to categorize the images in respect to the relationship has become even higher.

The basis upon which the shapes are viewed through includes the similarities and the differences. The differences in scale imply that one image is