Someone linked me this beautiful poster, and I'm just really impressed.
My contribution:
#as someone who was in graphic design classes for four years the design above makes complete total sense#the text is arranged so that the biggest and colored text is where you go to first#then the text in the middle#reading from up to down as that’s how people typically observe things#zero clue what op is even complaining about
fascinated by this. seriously? you think it makes total sense? read the tags in the notes, and note how many people totally failed to realize the "intended" pattern was even possible. yes, people tend to start with a brightly-colored thing, but once they start reading, they tend to read nearby text next rather than jumping around.
so once you've read "it is against the law to", your brain isn't coming to the poster fresh looking for the most brightly colored text it can find, or looking for something on the same circle but oriented the opposite direction with respect to the circle's path; it's going to look for a new line of text that starts just below the line of text it just read, and get "keep alcohol out of", and keep doing that, getting "it is against the law to keep alcohol out of the hands of youth supply alcohol to minors".
if you don't follow that, well, look at the mockup i did, and note how many people read it as "graphic passion is my design", because top-down wins over outside-in.
this is one of those things where if your academic model of the thing is not predicting the real-world outcome, it's very important to recognize that since graphic design is about communication, and communication is about what people actually get from seeing the work, if lots of people are "reading it wrong", that means it is designed wrong. doesn't matter that you have an abstract theory about how they "should" read it.
same vibes as the color theory discourse about the blood trails in the hospital really.





















