Visual Hierarchies

The Ace Hotel New York City, Dana Tanamachi

This design by Dana Tanamachi uses typography to create visual hierarchy. The preattentive features in this design are the typefaces that say "Free" and "Dream". They are larger and much bolder than the rest of the text. This typeface stands out because it is bold and boxy with a drop shadow, making it look more emphasized. The text that says "Free" is at a different angle than the rest of the text, working as the main attention grabber. The bold font tells us that those words are important to this design because it stands out from the other text. If this design was on a bigger scale with more words illustrated, our brains would could create visual queries and tell us to look out for this boxy text in order to locate all the important words within the text. Similar to the example in the text about the oranges, our brains would seek out the bold text and ignore other details. 

This screen shot from the anime, Pokemon is a good example of top down visual processing. This screen is played before a commercial break showing the outline of  a different Pokemon. The viewer has to look at the details of the outline and guess which Pokemon it is. The viewer pays attention to the details and puts together what Pokemon associates with the shape that is shown. They link the information that is shown with the visual of that certain Pokemon. The knowledge that the viewer has of the different Pokemon characters help them figure out what the picture is of.

Syntactical Guidelines

This poster for the show breaking bad shows a good example for use of the syntactical guidelines. The first thing I noticed was the way the color created patterns that defined different pictures. The interactions between the colors make the shape of a chemistry glassware as well as the outline of the characters from the show. The image is balanced because of the white text at the bottom and the white chemical pattern at the top.

This album artwork for the band Thursday is an example of how syntactical guidelines can sometimes not work together. This design all together creates too much stress using too many negative and positive images.