mario garcia
How the eyes move across a page In 1984, my colleague Dr. Pegie Stark Adam and I conducted research on how the eys move on the page at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which led to publication of “Eyes on the News” (www.poynter.org). Results of that study are more current today than ever. Designers of all types of publications can benefit from this research. In the study we learned that:
Readers enter a printed page through the largest image on the page, usually a photograph. After this, headlines are seen by the majority of readers. Captions under photographs are the third most frequently visited part of the page.
So we learn that our best opportunities to grab the attention of readers are in these three areas. We learn that we must always have one dominant element on the page, three times bigger than any other visual element on that page. This is the reader’s point of entry. We also learned that headlines and photo captions are fantastic tools in which to add new, compelling information.
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