Developing an understanding of visual hierarchy is the secret to unlocking the power to directly influence how a viewer sees, responds to, and uses a design, whether it be a website, app interface, or poster. Here, we’ll explain what visual hierarchy is and unveil 6 essential tips for mastering visual hierarchy in art and design.
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Visual Hierarchy in Design
Visual hierarchy in design refers to how elements are manipulated on a layout, to give a sense of order and underline the sequential importance of elements. By adjusting the size, contrast, color, or alignment of type or imagery on the layout, you can direct the pathway of the design and build a sense of visual hierarchy.
The purpose of visual hierarchy in graphic design is to successfully convey information in a short amount of time. Without hierarchy design, a composition can be difficult to read and comprehend, leading to a loss of interest and usability.
Brands and businesses often rely on the visual hierarchy design principle to guide a consumer towards purchasing a product, or to allow the user to find essential information quickly and efficiently.
Whether you’re designing a business card or a website, visual hierarchy can order and elevate your composition, and lead to sales success!
Below, discover six guiding principles for using visual hierarchy in design projects, plus inspiring visual hierarchy examples to spark your creativity.
Create balance and harmony on your print and web designs with visual hierarchy. Clockwise from top left: Designs via Press Play on Tape studio, Escape Coffee; Jonathan Quintin, and Pierre Jeanneau.
License this image via Anton Vierietin.
What Is Visual Hierarchy?
What is the definition of hierarchy in graphic design? A design strategy used in print design, website design, and UI design, visual hierarchy is the principle of arranging elements on a layout to create a sense of order and importance.
By structuring visual elements, designers can guide the eye of the viewer across the layout, creating a pathway of information, imagery, or CTAs (calls-to-action).
Visual hierarchy is the principle of arranging elements on a layout to create a sense of order and importance.
Visual hierarchy in design is particularly important for improving the functionality and accessibility of websites, as well as for making designs appear more ordered and attractive.
A vital design principle to know and use, visual hierarchy in design can be achieved by manipulating the following characteristics:
- Size: Larger elements are noticed more immediately than smaller ones.
- Color: Bright or bold colors attract more attention than muted or neutral colors.
- Contrast: Colors with a greater level of contrast on imagery or type draw the eye more easily than those with less contrast.
- Alignment: Break the grid with an eye-catching out-of-alignment element.
- Repetition: Suggest relation between elements by repeating styles, colors, or icons.
- Proximity: Place elements close together to suggest relation.
- White space: Include plenty of negative space around an element to draw focus to it.
- Style: Build eye-catching textures, background styles, or imagery into the design to draw focus to elements.
License this image via Anton Vierietin.
How to Create Visual Hierarchy: 6 Rules to Know and Use
What can be used to improve visual hierarchy in your designs? The characteristics listed above are a good starting point for building visual hierarchy in design projects, from creating a visual order through manipulation of scale, color, or contrast, for example.
Below, we’ll look at six of these characteristics in more detail, looking at helpful examples for establishing visual hierarchy in typography, graphic design, and website design.
1. How to Build a Design Hierarchy with Color
We know that color choices can have an astounding psychological impact on how a viewer responds to your design, but did you know that you can also use the color spectrum to build visual hierarchy in designs, creating a sense of sequence, directing focus and denoting importance by simply making clever color choices?
For example, advancing colors, which are warmer colors such as red, orange, and yellow, have the ability to draw the eye when set against cooler, receding colors, such as blue or green.
You might notice on app and website designs that buttons, prompts, or CTAs are often denoted with warmer colors. In nature, these advancing colors are frequently associated with things that denote danger—such as the bright yellow of a wasp or the crimson red of blood—and, as a result, we are hardwired to notice these colors before others.
To promote visual hierarchy in graphic design, you can use bright, bold, or neon colors to denote type or graphics that should be looked at first.
In the visual hierarchy examples below, you can see how a bold use of color on some elements of an otherwise minimal design can bring the focus sharply to these elements.
Eye-catching neon colors draw the eye to the central part of this flyer design by Jonathan Quintin.
2. How to Denote Importance with Size and Scale
When it comes to design hierarchy, size truly does matter. A key part of building hierarchy in graphic design, the rule of thumb goes that elements that take up a large area in a composition get noticed first.
This visual hierarchy principle explains why headings and other important details are typically larger than body copy on any print design or website layout.
Take note that it’s also not just visual hierarchy typography that responds to size and scale—images, illustrations, symbols, and shapes also benefit from this super-sizing technique.
When experimenting with the size of visual elements on your design, it’s wise to ensure that the difference in size between a sequence of elements is large enough to make a clear distinction.
Think of H1, H2, and H3 headings on a website design—these will need to be very different in scale to one another to make the sequence of headings clear. Too minor a distinction and the strength of the design hierarchy sequence is lost.
When arranging elements on a design layout, try splitting each type of element, such as images or type, into a sequence through A, B, and C of scale—A being the largest and C being the smallest.
In this way, the largest ‘A’ image and ‘A’ type will always catch the eye first, making these the best choice for headlines and hero images. Subheadings and supporting images will be set at ‘B’ scale, and body text or minor icons are down at the end of the sequence as ‘C’.
3. How to Create Visual Hierarchy in Typography
Another important aspect of building visual hierarchy is the use of effective typeface styles and font pairings to create typographic harmony on your layout. Visual hierarchy in typography-centric designs is important not only from an aesthetic point, creating beauty and balance in your type, but also from a functional point of view, promoting legibility and clarity for your typed messages.
You can promote visual hierarchy in typography by focusing on size, style, and contrast. Large headlines will naturally draw the eye more than a smaller subheading, but you can also emphasize the eye-catching quality of large text by using a heavy or bold typeface, or a display font featuring block lettering or condensed styling.
We’ll look at contrast in a little more detail below but, for type, the best rule to follow is to keep in mind that the greatest amount of contrast (think black against white) will draw the greatest amount of attention to your message.
Whether you’re working with three typeface styles or one with your design hierarchy, there needs to be a clear indication of which words are to be read first (level one text), second (level two text), or third (level three text).
Important information such as titles, headings, or names are typically read first, then subheadings, body text, and supplemental details follow.
Also note that the formation of typography on your design will impact visual hierarchy. A grid-based design, as demonstrated in the Théâtre de la Porte St-Martin posters below, allows you to organize your typography in a rough grid of squares across a layout, placing smaller text sections in parts of the grid that sit below, or to the sides, of the hero headline.
You can also experiment with ‘breaking the grid,’ and arranging typography into a diagonal or sporadic layout. This eclectic technique, pioneered by the Swiss School of Graphic Design in the 1950s, is a surprisingly effective way of bringing balanced visual hierarchy into a design, albeit in a more dynamic way.
The website layout for Escape Coffee uses a carefully composed hierarchy of type to direct the eye across the page.
Poster designs for Théâtre de la Porte St-Martin via Pierre Jeanneau.
Yeahnot via Marina Mescaline, Taras Rusych, and Mihail Melnichenko.
4. How to Use White Space to Improve Focus
Negative space, or white space, refers to the spacing around a specific subject, whether it be a title, image, or illustration. This ‘blank’ space is just as important to building visual hierarchy as the subject it surrounds—white space gives the composition room to breathe, focuses the eye on the subject, and guides the viewer almost imperceptibly throughout the design.
Not only does negative space help to separate different elements in a hierarchy design, it also acts as a palette cleanser for the viewer, allowing the eye to rest as it takes in each part of a layout.
To emphasize certain aspects of your design and promote hierarchy in art and design projects, you can increase the amount of negative space around the subject. This isolates the key elements and allows the viewer to navigate directly to the focal point.
Think of how a whitewashed art gallery helps to bring complete focus to an artwork, or how a ship on the horizon appears highly visible, despite being a long distance away.
5. How to Use Alignment in Design Hierarchy
For text-heavy layouts, newspaper designs, or data-saturated webpages, it can be easy to overwhelm the viewer with the sheer volume of information. A great way to organize a composition is to promote hierarchy in design projects through text alignment.
Working with lots of text? Begin with a grid-based design to organize text into columns and sections, before splitting your text into an A, B, and C hierarchy, as touched upon earlier.
Larger text, such as headlines, subheadings, and pull quotes often benefit from being aligned centrally, while smaller body text sections can be arranged in columns, flushed left or justified to create a neat appearance.
Use areas of white space to bring balance to text aligned left, and provide generous margins to improve ease of reading and legibility.
While alignment usually refers to typography in terms of visual hierarchy, you can also incorporate the same principle to patterns, lines, or other illustrations. Using a grid-based approach to design helps to maintain a sense of organization throughout.
6. How to Master Contrast in Hierarchy Design
Imagine looking at a completely flat design that features muted variations of the same color. Aside from being incredibly dull to look at, a composition without contrast actively impedes the reading and viewing of a design.
A successful visual hierarchy relies on contrast in order to bring forth visual interest, creating a ‘3D’ appearance that allows elements to pop from the page. In modern web design, contrast is also essential for promoting accessibility on websites, aiding viewers with visual impairments to find information quickly and easily.
Contrast can take many forms on a design hierarchy, including through color choice, typeface style, pattern, temperature, and saturation. You can also boost the contrast of printed items such as book covers or posters with different print finishes and textures, such as gloss or metallic foiling.
To build visual hierarchy in design with contrast, let the important elements stand out by contrasting their appearance against other parts of the design.
If you’re using a serif font throughout the majority of a composition, for example, experiment with a contrasting bold sans serif on headlines to steal the spotlight. Instead of keeping an image cool-toned, play around with a warm color here and there, to build a contrasting design hierarchy.
When it comes to visual hierarchy, contrast really is the spice of life!
Bold and minimal color contrast used to striking effect on the website design of Press Play on Tape studio.
Conclusion: Finding the Perfect Balance with Visual Hierarchy
Bring balance and beauty to your designs with visual hierarchy. Using these visual hierarchy examples and tips as creative inspiration, you can lean into your next layout with confidence!
Interested in learning more about design essentials and principles? Don’t miss these articles below:
License this cover image via Anton Vierietin.
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