Week 2 Reading

Having a clear visual hierarchy in your pages can help the audience significantly. The most important headings are large, bold, in a distinctive color, set off by more white space, or near the top of the page. I find this in everyday articles such as websites, magazines, billboards, etc. The hierarchy shows you what the point of the designer or the company is trying to make. If a page has a unclear visual hierarchy, the audience is reduced to slower scanning and to forced to try and make sense of what was stated. Making things as easily obvious to the audience is the intention of designing a site that gets the message across. Refrain from unnecessary clicks is a powerful tool when creating site layouts. Some good advice that I took from the reading is to make everything that is unessential unavailable. It reduces the noise level of the page when the message is pin point and the useful content is more prominent.

http://seanlandry.com/blog/2009/10/14/a-little-about-visual-hierarchy/

http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-basics/design-principles/visual-hierarchy.4750.html

http://www.plainlanguage.gov/howto/guidelines/bigdoc/writeOmitUnnecc.cfm