Visual Analysis
Séverine Bouyssou

What is a research report?
A research report is a publication that reports about the findings of scientific observations on or about a subject, based on recorded data, observation, anaylsis and conclusion, typically in the form of surveys. This can be completed by any sectors e.g. industry, education, government and non-government organizations. Usually the report is either published internally or made public.
The main goal of a report is to transmit details about a study for the target marketer group and to design new strategies.

In my case, the niche target market is graphic design. My research is about how people percieve a particular graphic design, such as a poster, which information they can extract and what do they remember. My analysis helps me to gain knowledge about perception and the meaning-making processes. Since there is no clear path or method to follow in within the discipline of art and design, I have to help myself with tools like psychology, philosophy, history, semiotics, and culture.

1. Preattentive Perception

My first survey consisted of showing a graphic design of my choice within 25 milliseconds - using a Tachistoscope - to 10 different people. It helps to analise the lowest level of perception without serious attention, which means it reveals how people perceive my poster in the first place.

The first group I examined consisted of females between 23 and 26. Two of them were graphic designers and the last one was an architecture student. I asked them in the evening during drinking. All of them perceived the circles with the shadow as sort of moons and only one of them mentioned the lines. The black colour was seen by everyone. One of them interpreted the background as a transparent and empty space or air, so that the moons would float. The other two did not mention the background at all, the just noticed the regular space between the shapes. Everyone noticed that the moons were lined up. Only one of them thought some moons were falling out of the row. The letters were hardly seen as letters, more as dots and thicker/thinner lines.

the second group i examined was mixed, between 22 and 27. three of them were graphic designers and the rest were students from different fields. All of them were sober and fully awake.

with these outcomes, I created diagrams in order to explain and structure the results. Diagrams and charts in general are more readable for our human eye, since we’re not angular people. We prefer lengths and heights instead of using heavy texts. Pie charts also are the less recommended charts because they might look appealing but they tend to be indecipherable. Lining up information makes it more accessible and effortless to read and compare numbers. People favor circles over of letters, so this is also a reason why very rounded and perfect fonts are not recommended for long textes. On my poster, I did use a rounded type, which would explain why certain friends did not recognize the letters and percieved only only lines.

On my design, we can also observe the pattern recognition, which means that our optical and visual system recognises a pattern, it is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. In my case, these would be the aligned circles and rows, since our eyes are trained to see those kind of patterns or algorithms. But the first group, who was drunk, could not see all the details. Reading is also a recognition pattern, we recognise words in total and see the whole word as an image. This is also why the spreaded letters of my posters were not seen as a whole and nobody could find the pattern of an entire word.

Furthermore I used the Gestalt Principles. They help to understand automated visual assumption of our brain. They are principles or also laws of human perception that describe how humans group similar elements, recognize patterns and simplify complex images when we perceive objects. Designers use the principles to organize content on websites and other interfaces so it is aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand. They might be old but they are still valide. Designers can use these principles too find mistakes or unwanted Gestalts in their designs and artworks. It is also very useful for e.g. interface design, as the designer doesn’t want the user to waste his time searching for buttons.

• Proximity

  Our eyes see groups by proximity, things that are close to each others, are perceived as groups (grouping). That can also happen with shapes, colours, similarity, complicated vs. simple. We easily see continuation. As designers, we can follow those natural design principles because it’s more simple. With my poster, we can clearly recognize the proximity and alignment of the circles and their shadow.

  

• Figure ground

  The most famous and important principle is figure ground. We always want to find a figure or at least things and a ground. That’s why condensed and bold Type is difficult to read within seconds. People cannot figure out what is happening, so condensed bold uppercase is appealing but it is hard to read and disturbs the viewer. This explains why my friends couldn’t see the word or all the letters especially the drunk group. Too much type might let the figure ground principle suffer. They had the illusion of seeing things but it was very blurry. The eye is always moving to find a solution for our eye deficit. Our blurry vision tries to find a goal. This tiny area of acute foveal vision is extended by eye movements, so called saccades. Saccadic movements: in a visual search task, the eye moves rapidly.
  Our retinal peripheral vision has a very good rate, even when it’s outside the center of gaze. People can perceive things behind and this is used in the approach of advertising: we see when things are moving, which catches our attention. But we are very bad at color vision, our retinal vision delivers mainly light-dark information.

• Closure

  The human eye prefers complete shapes, so we automatically fill in small gaps between elements which are close to each other to perceive a complete image. We try to see the whole first. In my case, there were no gaps since every shape is already a whole in itself.

• Similarity

  People tend to group elements that are in the same region, to close the group. We include related objects, that seems to be quite similar in the same area to show they stand apart from other groups.
  
  In conclusion, Gestalt psychology is a school of thought that looks at the human mind and behavior as a whole. the effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves. According to Gestalt psychology, the whole is different than the sum of its parts. Gestalt psychologists developed a set of principles to explain perceptual organization. These principles are often referred to as the “laws of perceptual organization.”
  For visual experience is more than just an abstract recognition of the features present in the visual field, but those features are vividly experienced as solid three-dimensional objects, bounded by colored surfaces, embedded in a spatial void. eg. In the world of Relativity, there are actually three sources of gravity. The modern view is that mind and brain are different aspects of the same physical mechanism.

2. Emotions

Emotion is a conscious mental reaction like anger or fear, subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. It is a subjective response to a person, thing, or situation. It may suggest the mere existence of a response but imply nothing about the nature or intensity of it. In this second chapter, I wanr to explore how something visual affects humans and which impressions does it leave.

The Affect Grid was invented in 1989 as a single-item measure of the two affect dimensions of pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleepiness. These two dimensions are most constitutive for an emotional state. Human behaviour is highly influenced by emotions.

Emotions are also in our facial expression: we have facial action. Our facial action coding system is divided in six basics emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. If we take Maluma effect by Wolfgang Köhler (introduced 1929), sound can be contected to shapes. He interviewed a group of students and the majority of his participants said that the word “takete” fitted better with the angular shape, whereas the word “maluma” fitted better with the rounded shape. Smooth lines sounds more like Maluma - which means that you can sing it, it is vocal. Takete sounds cutted since it contains a lot of consonants, they stop the air and are explosive. It fits more to edgy lines and the shapes look more static, moving or even aggressive.

The Semantic Differential

It is a type of a rating scale designed to measure the connotative meaning of objects, events, and concepts. The connotations are used to derive the attitude towards the given object, event or concept. This method is used in graphic design, to determine people’s feelings towards a product.

• The purely visible: brightness, contrast, color
• The tangible: cross modal perceptions like sharpness etc. , busy-relaxed, tangled-structured
• The embodied: stability, movement, spatial order, tilted-balanced
• The sympathetic: any bodily human (or animal) expression

In my study, scores on the semantic differential were obtained from the two groups I interviewed. We can observe that opposing items might help with some products but with my case, the results were very varied and there is no real pattern to see. We can just estimate that most people found the poster round and fixed, whereas the rest is totally divided.

3. Construction

Which arrangement is suggested by the format?
Since the format of my poster is vertical, it suggests a side-by-side arrangement and at the same time also vertical-stacking. It is really centred, since the rows are all the same weight and aligned from left to right horizontally, also the space in between the rows is balanced. Even if there are some circles which are slightly falling out of their rows, it does not feel pressed.

Color contrasts

Johannes Itten, who was painter, designer and teacher in the Bauhaus school, was the first to make a theory about the possible types of contrasts that are produced by the different features of color. He distinguished seven types of contrast: saturation, temperature, simultaneous, proportion, luminosity, hue and complementary colors. My poster has only the light-dark contrast, since it is monochrome.

Generative principles of axes and grids and meaning in composition

These principles help us to understand what the basis of the design is: its skeleton, its invisible elements. We can also analise if there is a modular or a fixed grid and if it can be restructured by changing the layout and try new possibilities. I my case, there is a clear grid due to the rows. Since the compostition is made out of repetitve identical shapes, it is not really possible to change or rearange the design of this poster. There is no real hierarchy or particular unbalanced arrangment because every single item has the same size. The circles with letters inside do not feel more bulky at all.

4. Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs and significations, and as graphic designers we create visual signs that are meant to elicit a certain effect in the mind. It is a theory which was initially introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916, who saw a sense of purpose that comes when there is an association relationship between a mental picture or concept with an idea. An object does not only contains an information, but also carries an emotional impact. Humans will catch the signal and then it will lead to a subjective conclusion and meaning, depending on the perspective. The use of communication through signs and symbols is used for many different things. A good example of this would be traffic signs. There are often symbols for pedestrians crossings made with silhouettes or simple stick figures. The purpose is usually to warn people of what to expect, and provide helpful information. Signs will usually have written directions, or symbols of arrows to show a certain way.

• indexical - correlation
• iconic - similarity
• symbolic- convention

So if we identify the relations between indexical-iconic-symbolic, the circles with shades look like closed rooms which can be moved in space, so they could be identified as the index. And the whole design is a symbol because it means and showcases space.

• Visual Rhetoric

  It is the art of effective communication through images, typography, and texts. Visual rhetoric encompasses the skill of visual literacy and the ability to analyze images for their form and meaning. Drawing on techniques from semiotics and rhetorical analysis, visual rhetoric examines the structure of an image, and the consequent persuasive effects on an audience. Visual rhetoric mainly involves the use of images. Using images is central to visual rhetoric because these visuals or images help in forming the case or arguing the point that the writer formulates. Also, visual rhetoric involves how writers arrange segments of a visual text on the page. In addition to that, visual rhetoric involves the selection of different fonts, contrastive colors, and graphs, among other elements, to shape a visual rhetoric text. So since space and room is not really touchable and hard to picture, we could say that my design is a metapher since it represents its meaning. It is also showing the opposite, since we could also interpret the circles as closed rooms and therefore limiting space instead of showing the infinite characteristics of space. There is no irony, exaggeration or personification in this artwork. It is more circumscribing the meaning.

• The semiotic square

  It is also known as the Greimas square, a tool used in structural analysis of the relationships between semiotic signs through the opposition of concepts, such as feminine-masculine or beautiful-ugly, and of extending the relevant ontology. It derived from Aristotle’s logical square of opposition, was developed by Algirdas J. Greimas, a French-Lithuanian linguist and semiotician, who considered the semiotic square to be the elementary structure of meaning. It is a very simple tool, that presumes that concepts can be constructed as oppositions, like pop music versus classical music, analog versus digital and tradition versus modernity.

• Multimodality

  It is an inter-disciplinary approach that understands communication and representation to be more than about language. It has been developed over the past decade to systematically address much-debated questions about changes in society, for example in relation to new media and technologies. This approach has provided concepts, methods and a framework for the analysis of visual and spatial aspects. For instance, understanding the medium of a a televised weather forecast involves understanding spoken language, written language, weather specific language like temperature scales, geography, and symbols such as clouds, sun, rain and so on. Applying this approach to my artwork, we can determine two main parts, the letters and the geometric shapes. We can analise that there is a modality in this particular case, since it requires reading and interpreting the shapes.

  

5. Aesthetics

The word is derived from a Greek word “aesthetikos” which means a sense of perception. It explains the philosophical study of beauty and taste; also, related to the study of sensory values. Studies have stated that creating good aesthetic products leads to better usability and visuality altogether. In this research, we asked ourselves which things were either “free beauty“, distinctive, functional or conforming. Free beauty means that an object is viewed not as a kind but solely as an individual in its own. The aesthetic judgment can disregard its object’s function, role, or purpose, even if it can be classified. In contrary, dependent beauty is the beauty of an item with a certain function. Their beauty is designed to fulfill a purpose. In our case, the aesthetic judgment of our artworks’s dependent beauty considers not its primary artistic function but more a subsidiary aesthetic one.

The Sublime

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” (Burke, 1757) According to Burke, the Beautiful is something well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime has the power to compel and destroy us. For him, beauty is the passion of love, the material (such as smallness, smoothness, delicacy, etc.) and also calming of our nerves.
The sublime has is the passion of fear, especially the fear of death, the material (such as vastness, infinity, magnificence) and it is the tension of our nerves.

6. Socio-cultural Background≠Discourse

In this chapter, we want to study the relationships between culture and cognition. We can ask for what purpose was the artwork designed and who designed it for who. This specific artwork was designed in a context of an architecture project at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. It was a typographical research and the outcome were six different posters/artworks about space and spaces in between.

The only technique that has been used is illustrator, since the idea was to use only vectors and lines. the style refers to brutalism and minimalistic design. Brutalism in digital design is a style that intentionally attempts to look raw, haphazard, or unadorned. It echoes early 1990s-style websites. Sometimes this aspect of brutalism is expressed as bare-bones, almost naked HTML site with blue links and monochromatic Monospace text. Brutalist designs want to break away from the premade-template sites that dominate the web today. They want the web to be true to itself, to feel honest and not contrived.

The socio-cultural precondition for this artwork series was for an articectural project, that tried to combine every interpretation of “space and spaces in between” of five different art disciplines in a room at the University as an art installation. The disciplines were photography, fashion design, graphic design, arcitecture and a painter. Unfortunately the project has been paused, since this research began in 2020 - right before the pandemic began. The arcitects were not allowed to pursue their installation in the University yet.

7. Practises

In this last chapter, we studied how our graphic designs are interacting with people in our everyday life. It is important to verify if our intentional use is accomplished, but it also primordial to look for all kinds of behavior, to see how graphic design is interlaced with other disciplines.

We were also asked to write poems, to order to imagine how our artworks could play a role in our life:

1. The day I first met you at that exhibition
2. I just felt dizzy.
3. So much about you were a confusion,
4. But still fascinating and silly
5. Your unintelligible meaning and pattern:
6. Sometimes straight,
7. sometimes crooked and slattern
8. But since we are not angular persons,
9. And although some judgement might seem disoriented,
10. I will never forget your grotesque letters.

8. Excursion

Designing data visualization

Any designer knows that desining charts can be a difficult challenge. With the preatention design principles, it can help to visualize statistics. The goal is to display data in a way that it provides efficiently informatio. For that, we need to find the best way to represent the data, like spatial arrangement/alignment, how to make it as much as accessible (e.g. colours) and to establish a visual hierarchy with contrasts and orientations (left - right).

So since we know now that the human eye prefers round shapes over angles and has a easy pattern recognition, we know that using a familiar chart type would make more sense. Using steamgraphs therefore can be very unique and would more memorable, but the readers can get very confused and prefer to read more common charts like bars, colums, lines or pies. As a general rule, we also know that adding too many data will be very confusing, so keeping it more simple for our eyes will be a better solution. Ordering and sorting statistic series improves the readability of the chart. It is also proven that using a distinct colour scheme provides a better visualization.

For my research, I verified how chart design is practical in a real life situation, optimizing the chart with more interesting aestetics and see, if a graph that catches the attention will be provinding also the right information. I wanted to find out, if breaking the rules and having more unique charts would still be informative and let the reader interpret the chart correctly. I also tried to change the style of the nowadays dominating templates we can find on dribbble for instance.
I showed some graphs i made about critical and creative thinking and one about the 5 stages of grieving to a few friends of mine, to see if they were capable to understand the charts and making them more catchy, would contribute to its efficiency.

My results were very clear. Everyone agreed that it was much more pleasant and interesting to look at. However, it takes a lot more time to read and understand, since the graphs are unknown and therefore it is harder to discern the topics of each graph. They all needed more verbal or written explanaition at the same time to fully get the message of each design. Designing data requires considerable precision and numeracy, but also careful thinking about audience, perception and accessibility. Because the information needs to be understood properly in order to make sense, there are some constraints by not following the design principles. We could conclude that this type of design works very well for a presentation/exhibition/exposition, since there is someone explaining and helping to interpret the graphs simultaneously. It also catches the attention of the listener, so they would not loose their concentration and stay focused on the presentation. But as an independent graphic without any further help, it might be too hard to figure out the mean sense and message of the graph.