MNteractive

We graphic designers tend to focus on the minutia. And while god is in the details, design, as a whole, can suffer when focus is taken away from the big picture.

A friend of mine once attended a talk by Paul Mijksenaar where he provided a list of what people find important when viewing a piece of type based design. While Paul focuses mainly on wayfinding, I find the list can be useful in a variety of cases where the design team is spending way too much time on debating serif vs. sans or which particular stock photo the client should use.

Hierachy of graphic resources

(what the readers think when viewing typography)

1. Order (chronololgy); Time, 3-dimensional
2. Position (page); 2-dimensional
3. Type size
4. Contrast (e.g. bold versus light)
5. Column width
6. Line spacing
7. Alignment
8. Typeface