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The successful New York advertising executive Hank Selden defends print, which he calls the "mother medium," with the following ode: "Nothing sells quality like a beautifully photographed, richly printed, full-colour page or spread: the gleam of a gold watch, the sparkle of a diamond, the lustre of fine leather, the softness of fur, the texture of a fabric, the richness of a fine wine."
Sounds simple, right? Deceptively so. Anyone who designs advertising knows Seiden, writing in Advertising Pure and Simple, The New Edition (AMA COM, 1990), is barely scratching the surface of what makes good print advertising, even if you're talking pure esthetics. How large is that gleaming gold watch, and from which angle was it shot? In what kind of light? What colour is the background behind it? What colour is most likely to attract the eye of a gold-watch buyer? Where is the contrast on the page featuring the "sparkling diamond"? Where is the text? For that matter, how much text is there and what does it look like?
Most designers would base their answers to these questions on a similar set of accepted beliefs, basic principles behind image construction that have not changed since the first edition of Seiden's book, more than 20 years ago. In essence, every good designer knows how to draw an eye to the sparkle of a diamond, the lustre of leather, the aubergine lipstick, because every good designer knows that, with the right tools, the eye can be guided.
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Or can it? The National Gallery in London, England just finished conducting, as part of an exhibit called "Telling Time" (which ran from October to January), the largest eye-tracking experiment in history. Using infra-red laser technology developed by researchers at Derby University, the gallery recorded the movements of people's eyes as they viewed works of art on a screen. Although conventional theory says we take in images as wholes and then explore the details by following clues in the composition-that is, we are "guided" by the artist-early evidence from the Derby study suggests people's eyes are more likely to dance all over an image, stopping here and there on thumbnail-size spots until they gradually assemble the entire picture.
Not only may the Gallery's...