Visual Hierarchy Quotes

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.

I believe consistency and orthogonality are tools of design, not the primary goal in design.

Clutter is not a property of information. Clutter is a failure of design.

Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

Dont confuse legibility with communication. Just because something is legible doesnt mean it communicates and, more importantly, doesnt mean it communicates the right thing.

Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea.

Good visual layout shows the logical structure of a program.

Hollywood is the most superficial thing you could possibly be a part of and if I weren't attractive I wouldn't be working at all.

People do not read first. First and foremost, they see color. Then they see numbers, then shape, and then, if you still have their attention and they understand what you put in front of them, then they will read.

The foreground in a picture is always unattractive... Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love.

If I was influenced by anything, it was architecture: structure having to do with logic. If you don't do it right, the whole thing is going to cave in. In a certain sense, you can carry that to graphic design. Fortunately, however, nobody is going to die if you do it wrong.

Lettering should be invisible. You shouldn't notice it, unless it is a determined piece of storytelling in graphic design. Whether handmade or digital, the lettering should be easy on the eye and well placed. It should help tell the story and do nothing to get in the way of it.

When writing for the page, the focus is on the design - how the words appear on the page. I try to make it as direct and simple as possible.

One of the most significant design principles is to omit the unimportant in order to emphasize the important.

Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.

As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs.

The frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting's expense.

One problem we discovered, for example, was that our "create a new account" button was in the wrong place...By simply moving it to the left side, mirroring the way people read, we saw a huge improvement in the way people used the site.

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Good Web design is about the character of the content, not the character of the designer.

Validation is easy - you run your site through a validator, and it's either valid or it isn't. The rest of the stuff, such as whether my logo or the biggest headline should be the h1 in my HTML, isn't so easy and is subject to interpretation.

Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you're trained in design, it won't look very good and it won't communicate very well.

As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.

Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.

Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.