What is Visual Literacy?// Posters/ Ads

 This is a collection of posters or magazine ads which I have dissected to explore what makes good or bad design in the context of type hierarchy. At first I expected the stronger work to contain less variation in typeface or font resulting in a more clear and concise layout, as I took apart these three 'posters' I found that this was, unusually, not the case.

STRONG DESIGN

 This is what I would classify as the strongest 'poster' visually. There is a lot going on and there is an interesting hierarchy of type. The hierarchy forces the reader to read all of the good parts of their promotion first; 50% off main courses is the first thing you see. Your eye is then drawn to the gold foiling which gives the idea of discount a touch of class. One of the last things you are likely to read is that the promotion is for Mondays only.

This is a photo demonstrating all of the text in the flyer placed in order of size and weight. This backs the first claim up further, that all of the good parts of the promotion are mentioned first, in the most heavy font followed by the 'bad parts' in less noticeable smaller fonts.

However this does not necessarily mean that the small text is not important to the viewer. In my opinion some of the smallest text on the flyer contains some of the most important information.  'Main courses are 50% off every Monday' is the most important information there, made up of three very different weights.

AVERAGE

 This is what I would consider to be an average or pretty normal looking poster. I would have expected the name of the lager 'Chrome' to stand out more on the poster but here it appears in a fairly small size on the face of the bottle and nowhere else. It is interesting that the advertisers chose to give the crappy tag-line so much dominance, I suppose this is part of a tactic to entice the viewer subconsciously or to justify the dodgy looking liquid flying everywhere. The viewers eye should probably run diagonally across the page starting with the very bold 'NEW', the eye is caught by the red, then to the refreshing looking bottle and tag-line ending on the Carling stamp bottom right.

 This is how I view the most important information on the page with most important at the top, the name of the brand, followed by what the product is, the alcohol content then the fact it is a new product. Everything else is just there to look good.

TERRIBLE

This is what I would classify as bad design. Interestingly the formula for little variation in fonts is followed but the delivery is still bad resulting in a poor outcome. Design flaws I can see here include a right alignment on a bullet point list and the clearly unintentional overlapping of black text and the image. Finally the use of Papyrus is totally uncalled for.

 Saying this, the utter simplicity of the ad means that the viewer can get all of the information they need very quickly, does this make it good design? No, they will never remember the brand because the ad is bland. But informative to the user who is nearby and just happens to be looking for jewellery.

 After uploading this photo perhaps I made a mistake on what I thought would be important to the viewer. In recollection it would be more appropriate to have the address right at the top of the ad as one of the most important pieces of information. To be honest all of this information is fairly important, on the other two posters there was lots of decoration text filling space, here there is very little wasted, as if they were paying by the word.