Visual Hierarchy: Her Seat at the Table

Project 2: Visual Hierarchy | C Mini Fall 2021

21 min readOct 28, 2021

project brief: Through a set of specific and systematic exercises, we will explore typographic variables in clarifying a message based on the content’s hierarchy.
learning goals: Describe the range of typographic variables that can be used to define your design options. Apply variables effectively to text to draw attention to specific pieces of information and aid the identification of content groups. Explain the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of combining variables to engage an audience and enhance the clarity of content

Research

I wasn’t able to find too much information on this event on the website. I think since the event is on zoom this year, CMOA didn’t try to advertise it too much. I found very brief descriptions on each of the sessions of the event. I thought the names of the events were pretty clever, as well as the title of the event “Her Seat at the Table”. Not only is implying a woman “having a seat at the table” but it is literally “her seat”, as this event discusses furniture design.

Their website includes an image of a chair designed by one the women designers they will be discussing in the series and their provide a list of the women designers that they will talking about:

“Charlotte Perriand, designer, French, 1903–1999; Le Corbusier, designer, Swiss, 1887–1965; Pierre Jeanneret, designer, Swiss, 1896–1967; Thonet Frères, manufacturer, French, 1929–ca. 2000; Chaise longue, 1929, chromed tubular steel, reinforced rubber, original Smyrna wool and leather upholstery, and parchment; Carnegie Museum of Art, Women’s Committee Acquisition Fund, 1996.19.A–.B”

This list dates back to the earliest designer being born in 1903, and goes until current day. Looking at the list, I can also see that many of them are from European countries, namely Switzerland and France, which have an influence on the type of furniture and designs that are shown.

Further information about the event:

About Crash Course: Crash Course is an ongoing series of topic-specific art history courses hosted by Carnegie Museum of Art. Past courses have focused on artists’ depictions of urban industry, Renaissance and Baroque art, and many others.
Crash Course Events are available to members, adults, and students and there is no fee to get into the event, you can simply pay whatever you want and the money will go to the museum. This may be a chance to encourage college students to attend as they may not otherwise be able to pay for such events
The designers will be focusing on designs that came from the Bauhaus school in Germany & the Good Design program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Both of these institutions have very specific styles of design that they produce
There is large focus on learning from past women designers and using their creations and knowledge to empower and inspire the new designers of the 21st century

About the organization:

CMOA’s mission: “Carnegie Museum of Art creates experiences that connect people to art, ideas, and one another. The museum is committed to global engagement and regional advancement. We champion creativity and its importance to society with experiences that welcome, inspire, challenge, and inform. Our core activities — collecting, conserving, presenting, and interpreting works of art — make those experiences possible.”

Some adjectives I would use to describe the event are empowering, celebratory, and educational.

Experimenting with Hierarchy

At initial glance I noticed:

The title is very long and it might be best to emphasize only one of the 2 parts (either “Her Seat at the Table” or “Women Designers in the 20th and 21st Centuries)
Broken up into 4 sessions which could be grouped together
Overall there is a lot of text and a lot of it can be grouped in various combinations

Hierarchy Exercises:

Exercise 1: Stroke Weight

Bolded text immediately emphasizes a piece of text but I quickly realize that bolding too much on the page caused it to lose emphasis. I thought that the most obvious things to bold were the title of the event and the titles of the sessions and the date and time, but when I tried to do all of those at once, everything got kind of lost. Having the bolded text minimal and spaced out proved to be the most effective.

Exercise 2: Line Spacing

Since there is so much text for my event, it was tempting to split everything up into multiple categories in an attempt to organize the information more. However, similar to the first exercise, I realized that it may be easier to digest information if there are fewer spaces. The one on the far left may be too condensed and the one on the far right is too spread out so I think it’s about finding a good balance with this one. I chose to space out the individual sessions, as I wanted those to particularly stand out to the viewer.

Exercise 3: 2 Flush-Left Margin

I realized I wasn’t a huge fan of indented lines, as I found it to be distracting from the content itself as the information gets broken up. However I did find that minimal spacing did provide some room to breathe and broke up the text in categories so that the viewer can take in chunks of text one at a time. The one on the far right provided that effect for me as it gave emphasis to the sessions and the title and the your eye goes the rest of the information after.

Exercise 4: 3 Flush-Left Margins

While this provides the reader with a clear hierarchy and organizes the information, I think it’s a detriment to the readability. The cascading text effect starts to get a bit distracting as I tend to focus more on the shape of the that the text is forming.

Exercise 5: Line Spacing + Stroke Weights

I think that this exercise was the very effective as it both split up information and provided room to breathe for the viewer but it also allowed certain text within a chunk to be emphasized, like having a title along with its body text. I also experimented with having more than one space between between lines and spreading out the information further on the page in certain places seemed to help with readability.

Exercise 6: 2 Stroke Weights + Horizontal Shift

This exercise felt disorganized as the bolded phrases felt repetitive with the indentations. I feel as though both and bold and indenting text works well with a lot of body text but since my information doesn’t have too much body text along with the titles of the events it may not be as effective.

Experimenting with Scale

In class we did some scale exercises with cut paper that allowed me to reposition the text on the page and see it would look digitally. Initially I was leaning towards using large text for everything, but I realized from walking around and looking at other people’s interpretations that I was leaning towards the ones that had a nice amount of negative space for the eye to linger on. This negative space, for me, was achieved by chunking a lot of the information together and limiting myself to only 2 font sizes and 2 stroke weights. I also learned that when shifting text to make it vertical, it’s best to shift it so it runs bottom to top, so people can easily read, as if they’re reading the spine of a book.

scale experiments (with title on the side)

I tried to incorporate what I learned in class into my scale experiments and I tried to leave a good amount of negative space. In the digitized versions I tried to stick to only a couple font sizes and I also tried arranging the session infos in different ways (vertical, horizontal, cascading).

We discussed the adjectives that describe our event and how we can use scale to further enhance those. I chose to try to emphasize “Women Designers in the 20th and 21st Centuries” to enhance the . I also thought this would be useful in case people are confused about the title “Her Seat at the Table”.

For the last 3 experiments I tried to arrange the title vertically but I found that the title was too long and it was too much information for a person to have to read sideways.

Experimenting with Color

Creating Color Swatches:

As I was cutting out colors I found myself gravitating more towards brighter colors, as I started swatching. When I think “women” and “empowerment” I think of bright colors and deep, royal colors like dark purples and blues contrasted with some brighter yellows and oranges. I tried colors that were close shades of primary colors and then experimented by playing off of those and creating triads of a color and 2 other colors that are the next shade over from its complementary color. (ex: orange, teal, and purple). Overall, I found myself coming back to purple and yellow shades, which when talking to Claire in class, I realized were the colors of the feminist movement. I’m not sure if this is too obvious, but I found these colors to be deep and empowering, as well as bright. I didn’t want something too muted or pastel because I was afraid it would take away from the “celebratory” and “empowering” nature of the event.

I tried combining my scale exercises with some of my color swatches and I started out by using only black and white for the text and a solid background color. I tried a brighter purple color and then I also decided to experiment with some more muted colors just to see if that would draw people in more.

I tried out some gradients as well to see if the colors would match and I also tried having a contrast color in the main title and session titles. The gradients seemed to be unnecessary and a bit distracting so I was drawn towards the purple background with the yellow title and pink text so I decided to show those in class.

Class/Vicki’s Feedback:

Out of the color exercises I showed, the salmon pink color stood out the most, some classmates said that that color was the most appealing to them.
The darker purple color was a really close to the “millennium blue” shade, which is a little overdone according to Vicki
I played it too safe with the scale of the text. Maybe changing the size of the “Her Seat at the Table” part will emphasize the “empowering” nature of the event. Splitting up the words of the title could also help to emphasize this.
The “cascading” effect of the text in some of my examples implies some sort of hierarchy and could allude to the fact that some sessions are more important than others

Imagery

Images I found:

On Unsplash I was starting to look at images already and in class we were told to quickly find an image and we did an exercise where we had to try to match the images to the event. I chose the image of a chair for the exercise, which seemed to be obvious for the event and multiple people chose chairs and some sort of architecture. While I was initially attracted to the idea of having a chair in my poster, I’m now starting to think that it may be too obvious and kind of an easy solution.

Most of the images I was looking at were of chairs, furniture, and architecture. I had a hard time finding images that not only represented the ideas of the furniture design but also encompassed a sense of womanhood and femininity. I was hitting a wall at this point and was struggling to find any inspiration. A lot of these images felt too professional or industrial to me and I felt that they were lacking emotion.

I tried experimenting with placing some images within the scale exercises that I created but none of the images were really speaking to me. I found it hard to try to work within the bounds of an image and rearrange my text around it.

I thought that this stock photo that I found of a woman architect was interesting at first, but I couldn’t figure out how to work the text on the page and create a harmony with it. I could have edited and reworked the images more but I think they felt too impersonal to me and I didn’t feel particularly drawn to any of them.

Creating Illustrations:

I really wanted to try to incorporate furniture into my poster without making it too obvious, and I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate the photos into the text, so I decided I would try to make my own graphics and illustrations for the poster. I noticed that a lot of the furniture that emphasized femininity had a lot of elegant curves in them. Even the chair that was used as an example on the event’s website had a curved chair in it, so I started brainstorming some ideas of how I could incorporate these shapes into a composition to frame the page with curves.

Some ideas that I had for illustrations included simple shapes that alludes to the concept of design and furniture. I tried to create these shapes as vector images in Illustrator. I liked that the silhouettes of the chairs framed the composition nicely and provided an area for the text to sit.

Exploring vector graphics on Illustrator

I thought that the chair vectors might be a little too childlike and I wanted to make it more minimalist and elegant, so I decided to simplify these shapes even more to create an extremely simple composition (far left image). I then tried adding text to the illustration to see what it would look like.

By this point in my exploration I felt that I was hitting a wall once again. I had spent a lot of time trying to iterate on these compositions and I felt as though I wasn’t getting anywhere. I liked the minimalism of these compositions and I could justify how they might emphasize the “design” aspect of the event but I could see that the “empowerment” and “celebratory” aspect of it wasn’t there. I realized that I may have been focusing on imagery too much and I was leaving the type for the end so I decided to try to restart my type experiments.

Revisiting Type Experiments:

In class, Vicki mentioned that I was previously being a little too safe with my type and my scale. She mentioned that I could use type to empower women through my poster so I decided to scale up the title a lot and have it take over the entire page. Since “Her Seat at the Table” was the main title I decided to make that part the largest and then work all of the other information around that. I wanted to use the empty spaces on the page that the eye is normally drawn to and fit the other information into those parts. I tried implementing one of my previous images into this

Revisiting Imagery:

Vector illustration created on illustrator

To match the larger type, I wanted to create imagery that would enhance the large type and create a sense of dimension on the page and I figured that I could do this by playing with gradients and opacity. I played around with curves and and layering different vector shapes on Illustrator and I finally landed on one that I was happy with. I chose a bright orange-red for the curves because I wanted those to stand out the most but I struggled with the background color for a while. I didn’t want it to be too bright and take away from the brighter shapes so I chose a complimentary teal-green color, but made it extremely muted.

After adding my large title type to the image I was able to figure out which shapes to layer on top of the text and which shapes to leave underneath the text and by doing this I was able to emphasize certain words over others. For example, I wanted “HER” and “TABLE” to be emphasized more since these were the first and last words. I wanted the viewer to be able to start and end with some concrete and mostly visible so I only layer a smaller shape over these words. The “AT THE” part was less important for me so I was okay with those words being more hidden behind the gradient. I was struggling with what I should do with “SEAT” but I ultimately decided that it should be on top of all the shapes because it was a bit unreadable underneath all of the intersecting curves.

When adding the additional text to the composition, I decided to go with a white to contrast with with the dark background. I was confused as to where I should place the text so I decided to try and split it up fit in rows. I didn’t have a formal grid but I noticed that the large text kind of created a horizontal grid and there were pockets where the text could sit.

In class crit & feedback:

When printing out my poster, the colors got kind of lost and the readability was lost since the contrast between the text and the background color
The white text is very disorganized and there needs to be a clearer grid structure
Rework the entire color scheme to make the title stand out more with a brighter color
Tighten the text leading all over the page
Try moving the text into
Chunking the text together into only 3 or 4 sections to keep it organized

Iterations

I wanted to try to improve on the iteration I showed in class so I first tried to change the color scheme. Vicki suggested that I take off all of the extra text on top and try to just work with the colors. After experimenting with the colors, the ones that stood out to me the most were the ones with bright colors for the titles. The bright green is a contrast from the red curves in the background. I tried changing the background to a dark blue color and then I contrasted it with brighter title colors.

When adding text this time I focused on emphasizing the the tagline and I chunked the text up into 4 specific groups: the tagline, the title, the sessions, and the time and date. The URL still ended up being on its own in the corner but I thought that the text should continue to the bottom of the page. I put the sessions info right in the middle in between the 2 T’s because I think people’s eyes are naturally drawn to that space and it seems more fitting to have the sessions all in one place rather than splitting them up.

Feedback from office hours with Yoshi:

Stick with the yellow and blue iteration (the green and red looks like Christmas)
Try fitting the session text underneath the 2 T’s from “AT THE” and and move the website URL into the crook of the L in “TABLE”, don’t overlap the text over the other text
Try making the text all the same size (other than the title)
Try rearranging some of the text to create a different narrative when to reader goes through the information
It is hard to tell where to start reading. After reading the large title, the reader doesn’t know exactly where to go next. There needs to be some sort of system or contrast so that the viewer which information is most important and what isn’t as important.

Revisiting Imagery:

After my meeting with Yoshi I was a bit stuck on how to move forward and improve my current poster and I was kind of tired of looking at it so I decided to take a different approach. I wanted to experiment and see if I could make something equally as empowering but more muted. I realized that my current poster was very bright, and while I was very attracted to the colors and shapes, a lot of my peers who I showed the poster to weren’t as drawn to it.

I had already been experiment for the past couple days with vectors of woman figures so I went off of this style and made more illustrations.

I made vector images of women inspired by minimalistic vector art as well as some Picasso style figures. I tried adding chairs in subtle ways to some compositions as well.

I created some poster iterations with the illustrations that I made. I really like how these turned out. I find that they are empowering in a completely different way from my previous one. However, I feel like they may be too simple and I don’t have enough time to fully develop them.

Posters I created from the illustrations

Feedback from Vicki:

After showing Vicki both options she agreed that my first one was stronger and my more recent exploration may not be as eye-catching when compared to other people’s posters on the wall. I also do not have enough time to fully develop this idea
When printed, the text appears to be too big, so try making the text overall much smaller
Try creating a sense of hierarchy by changing the color of certain pieces of text. The white text gets lost on the red background so try changing that to make it darker
There’s a large spot in the middle that needs to be filled so try moving a large piece of text there.

I added these adjustments and settled on this for the final poster. I liked that it was readable and I thought the blue added a nice contrast. It also added a sense of hierarchy since the information in white is the first part you look at after title, while in the information in blue is secondary, so there is a clear path for the viewer’s eye.

Figuring out color on print:

I was struggling with how to get my printed poster to look more accurate to what I saw on screen because despite having CMYK colors and trying to print the document in various different ways, the colors would come out much darker on paper. In lab, Andrew was able to give me some advice on how I could make the colors print more accurate to how I saw them on the screen. He mentioned often times designers will have to create a print version and digital version since colors don’t exactly work the same on the 2 mediums. By creating swatches on Illustrator and doing test prints I figured out which colors would give me the hue that I wanted to achieve and I could replace and switch out the swatch colors on my illustration and print out a different version.

The far left is my final digital version & the middle is the final print version, which creates a more saturated physical version when printed (far right):

Final Critique

During the final crit, Elise pointed out that she liked that the main title and the title in the middle were readable from very far away, but it was hard to read from far away. I started thinking about changing the colors, but Cathy mentioned that she liked this about my poster because it meant the user had to get closer to the poster to read the fine print. Other comments I got were that the colors stood out and caught people’s eye, it conveyed empowerment, and that there was a nice sense of depth visible on the page. Since I didn’t get any concrete feedback during the final crit, and I couldn’t think of anything else to change, I decided to keep this for my final iteration. I felt as though I had exhausted all of the options I could for this composition and I was happy with the final product.

Personal Reflection

This project was extremely helpful in teaching me the rules of hierarchy. I never previously thought about how a viewer’s eye moves through a poster and how we can make small decisions that can guide a viewer’s eye through a page to look at exactly what we want them to in a specific order. At first I was a little overwhelmed with the amount of ways we could manipulate the text, with font size, stroke weight, etc., but I eventually learned how to create a balanced composition of all of these elements with making as little changes to the text as possible. Overall, I really enjoyed the process of this project and I loved experimenting not only with type, but also with imagery and creating my own artwork to incorporate into my posters. Thank you for your guidance and feedback throughout this project!!!