Visual Hierarchy Principles Every Non-Designer Needs to Know

I've always been interested in visual design. In fact, I used to want to be a graphic designer before I was drawn to the world of marketing. Over the years though, I've found that design has played a significant part in my career, including email design, website design, logo design, branding, blogging, social media, landing page design, presentation design, and even photography. I've had experience in all of these areas, but in reality, today's internet-driven world makes it almost impossible to avoid being engaged in some form of design.

But when it comes to graphic design for most of the areas outlined above, there are some basic principles that even a non-designer should know to make their designs the most effective they can be.

What makes a great design? Even amateurs who wouldn't consider themselves as being any sort of designer can create effective and compelling compositions by prioritising their content.

Two good questions to ask yourself before embarking on a design:

• What is the most important element of your design?
• What do you want audiences to notice second or third?

These questions are referring to what's called 'Visual Hierarchy', which is a method of organising design elements in order of importance. In other words, it’s a set of principles that influence the order in which we notice what we see.

"These golden rules help us compose designs that are aesthetically pleasing and attract the right attention." - Visme

To help visualise the visual hierarchy principles, the crafty folks at Visme have illustrated 12 of these concepts, summarized in this infographic:

Do you digest this kind of stuff better via video? In that case, check out this instead:

I hope you found this useful as much as I did. It's easy to forget some of these if you're creating things day-to-day, so using this as a reference to keep you focused can really help.