Chapter 4. Organizing the Page:
Layout of Page Elements Page layout is the art of manipulating the user's attention on a page to convey meaning, sequence, and points of interaction. If the word "manipulating" sounds unseemly to you, think about it this way. Film and television directors make their living by manipulating your attention on the movie or TV screen, and you are presumably a willing participant. Likewise for editors who arrange articles, headlines, and ads on a newspaper. If all this content were presented in a drab monotone, with no graphic emphasis to grab and move your attention, you would actually find it harder to extract meaningwhat's supposed to be important, and what's not? Even though it is ultimately an art, there might be more rationality to good page layout than you think. Some important ideas from graphic design are explained in this chapter introduction; each can guide you in the layout of pages, screens, and dialog boxes. We'll talk about visual hierarchy, visual flow and focal points, and grouping and alignmentall are predictable and rational approaches to page design. This chapter's patterns describe concrete ways to apply those high-level concepts to interface design. But the changeable, interactive nature of computer displays makes layout easier in some ways, harder in others. We'll talk about why that's true. Some of these patterns work as well in print as they do onscreen, but most of them would be useless in print because they presume that the user will interact with the page. |
