Category: visual design
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #106 — People Prefer Objects With Curves
Do people prefer logos with curves rather than logos with interesting angles? Have you noticed that your favorite smartphones, tablets, and laptops tend to have rounded corners?People prefer objects with curves—a preference that’s evident even in brain scans. This field of study is called neuroaesthetics. Bar and Neta showed concrete and abstract images with and…
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The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #103 — Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder’s Age, Gender, And Geography
Which of these search engine home pages do you find most visually appealing?: Naver.com is the search engine for South Korea. Google is the search engine for lots of other places. Whether you found the Google design more visually appealing or whether you found the Naver design more visually appealing has a lot to do…
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The Neuro-Aesthetics of Hillary’s Campaign Logo
Yesterday Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for President of the US, and before 24 hours went by I had a media request to talk about why people were reacting so strongly (in a negative way) to her logo. I’m in the middle of writing my next book (100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs to Know About…
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Red Or Blue?: Research On Screen Color That May Surprise You
How does color affect our behavior when we are doing things online? Does it make a difference what the color background is? Does it depend on what we are reading or doing? Can you affect people’s decisions and behavior by changing the background color of a particular page or screen? Research by Ravi Mehta and…
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How To Get People To Do Stuff: #3 — A Hard-To-Read Font Will Activate Logical Thinking
I am taking a chance here, because I know that the subject of fonts is always controversial, and if I say that you should use fonts that are hard to read I’ll be blasted by many of my readers! But I have to share this fascinating research on how mental processing changes in some surprising…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #96 — Past Experience And Expectations Determine Where People Look
Where do people look first on a computer screen? Where do they look next? It depends partially on what they are doing and expecting. Left to right? — If people read in languages that move from left to right, then they tend to look at the screen from left to right. If they read from…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #92 — There Is A Brain Area Dedicated To Perceiving Faces
You are walking down a busy street in a large city and suddenly you see the face of one of your close relatives. Even if you were not expecting to see this person, and even if there are dozens, or even hundreds of people in your visual field, you will immediately recognize this as your…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #51 — You React To Colors Based On Your Culture
Many years ago I worked with a client who had created a color map of the different business regions for their business, showing the total revenue for the quarter for each region. Yellow was for the Eastern part of the US, green for the Central, etc. They had used red for the western states. The…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #28 — Things that are close together seem to belong together
Do you want a quick and easy way to make any web page easier to use and more intuitive? If you want people to realize that two things “belong” together, then put them near each other (close proximity), and put other things a little further away. Sounds simple, right? Many usability and user experience principles…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #27 — We go below the "fold"
For the last year or so there has been a heated debate about “the fold”. The fold is the idea that there is a place on a web page that is the bottom edge of what people will see when they look at the page in a browser, and that in order to see anything…
