People are met with visual mediums that relay information daily. The information must be designed so that passers-by can find and understand it as soon as possible. In the bachelor’s thesis, we studied the effects of typography and graphic design on the detection and perception of information in visual mediums. Our goal was to discover what design of type attracts the observer and what is the best way to design type so that the observer will be able to remember the information best.
To do so, we studied visual perception, physically and how the psycho-physical processes work. We studied reading and did in-depth research on graphic design, its history, specific graphic elements, types of contrast, and the field of color. The last topic of interest was typography and readability.
We experimented by making 20 samplers onto which we placed four five-letter Slovenian words. The samplers were divided into four sections: words using different typefaces, words that were colored in a random color, words where only one word was colored in a fully saturated hue, and, lastly, a sampler where one of the four showcased words had its type size enlarged by a factor of two. There were 35 participants in the experiment, and it was carried out utilizing an eye tracker device (Tobii Fusion Pro). The participants viewed different samplers for a brief period after which they had to respond with what word they saw first.
The results were gathered in the form of pie charts for each sampler based on the frequency of answered words. Alongside pie charts, heat maps of eye positions made by the eye tracking software were used for analysis of results. We discovered typeface does not have as big of an influence as the position of the word on the layout. However, serif typefaces with distinct stroke shapes were still among the more recognized. With colored words, red tones with high contrasts were better detected and, on the contrary, red hues were not. In the cases of one word being colored, the more commonly recognized were those that had a high or extremely low contrast ratio (relative to the background or the black used in the remaining 3 words). We also discovered that the biggest influence on the perception of information in participants was the size of the type.
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