There are 1302 words on this page. That’s actually shorter than the average COLORS story. But this time, we’ve done nothing whatsoever to make you want to read it. No short captions. No big pictures. No pretty colors. In fact, the chances that you will take the time to read to the end of the page are virtually nil. You’re biologically disadvantaged, to start with. “Humans haven’t evolved to read,” explains visual psychologist Arnold Wilkins of Essex University, UK. “We’re used to using two eyes to grasp tools, but reading isn’t natural. Text has been around a relatively short time.” Humans are more accustomed to scenery - a tree, say, or a view of the horizon, - that contains plenty of natural clues to guide their brain around it. The experts call it spatial differentiation. It means that when you look at a scene, you can identify a particular branch because of its position on the tree, perhaps, or because its individual characteristics mark it out from other branches. (Congratulations if you’ve got this far, incidentally. Most people have only an eight second attention span.) Text, by contrast, is “self-similar” - it’s all pretty much the same. Nothing leaps out to grab your attention. To read it, your right eye jerks across the line of text, landing on the middle third of each word. Your left eye follows a fraction behind. Together, they take in the other two-thirds of the word before moving onto the next one. Sometimes they’ll skip a word and have to move back skip a word and have to move back. All in all, reading is not simple. And then there’s the layout of the text itself. At a distance, the horizontal lines of text form stripes. You’re probably not aware of it, but to your eyes, “striped” text (such as you’d find in a book) shimmers, contributing to the mild stress of reading. And why should you read this anyway? Thousands of other things clamoring for your attention: The total of all printed knowledge doubles every eight years. On November 13, 1987, the New York Times newspaper was 1,612 pages long, contained over 12 million words, and weighed 5.4kg, the size of healthy newborn twins. It’s not just print, either: “There’s something in the story that people have been trained to take in soundbites and visual bites,” says Arnold Wilkins. “Information is presented in short chunks, so people aren’t prepared to concentrate for a long time.” In the 1960’s, a one-minute television commercial consisted of eight to 12 images or camera shots. A recent soft drink commercial aimed at young people consists of 22 images in a 30 second period - about one image a second. The average TV viewer with a remote control changes channels 35 times an hour. No wonder advertisers have understood that they shouldn’t use sentences of more than four words, says media psychologist Dr. Bernard Luskin. (”Just do it!”) The point is, there are so many places your attention might wander to, the odds are stacked against you reading to the end of an article before you even begin. So newspapers and magazines spend a considerable amount of time trying to lure your attention. To do that, they need to know how you read. Pegie Stark Adam did a study a few years ago for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, USA. “We used two tiny cameras that tracked exactly where people’s eyes moved on the page, recording where it stopped, how long it stayed at certain places, where it traveled second, third and fourth and so on,” she explains. 95 percent of readers looked at photographs first. That doesn’t surprise visual psychologist Arnold Wilkins. “Like natural scenes, the spatial content of a photo varies with its spatial scale.” Even if you’re a college graduate, there’s a chance that you’re only comfortable with a fifth of your language’s vocabulary. (651 words - you’re halfway through.) So here’s a translation of Professor Wilkins’ quotation: “Photographs are more varied than text.” Consequently, the information is easier to take in. After photographs, you may read the photo caption, but your eyes will probably jump to the headlines. The bigger the better? Not necessarily. Hold this page away from your face. Whatever stands out on the page from that distance is what your eyes will be attracted to as they move across the page. Bold text catches attention more than big text, although it pays to use headlines sparingly. “If you always have a huge headline,” says Simon Esterson of Britain’s The Guardian, “What are you going to do when World War III breaks out? And anyway, a page full of huge headlines gets boring.” Instead, designers set up a hierarchy of headlines to communicate the importance of a story - a kind of visual shortcut. “Developing a headline is an extraordinarily precise skill,” continues Dr. Luskin. “It’s designed to catch your attention in passing and get you to focus to a higher level of interest. If you can get even a fragment of attention, then you have something. Then you simply use repetition.” Studies have shown that to commit something to memory, you have to go over it on four separate occasions. It works the same with print media. The more you read of a genre, the more familiar you get with it, and the easier it is to read. In fact, familiarity is one of the strongest weapons a newspaper designer can wield. “We have a whole vocabulary of headlines that we understand and that we hope our reader understands subliminally,” says Tom Bodkin, chief designer at the New York Times. “If you read the paper for any length of time, you get a feeling for what’s important based on the style of the headline, the position on the page, all those little clues. It’s a very complex language.” Columns help to order the information. There’s a lot to cram in, after all: The entire script of a half-hour television news bulletin would fit on one page of a broadsheet newspaper. And color makes it more attractive. “Readers told us they like color on a page,” says Pegie Stark Adam, “because they felt the pages with color on them had the most information, and they read more. Actually when you study the tapes, they didn’t read more, they just imagined they read more because of the color, which was really interesting.” (Or was it? Did you read those 54 words without skipping any?). Call-outs, stand-outs, subheadings and color are meant to ease your reading. All these devices break up the article itself, to encourage the reader’s attention to stay focused. (There should be a new paragraph here, for example). So why do people read newspapers that look boring, but don’t read magazines that look exciting? The real secret of why people still read newspapers and books, and why you’re still reading this story is CONTENT. “Design is about content, all the way along,” says Ally Palmer of The European. “If you don’t have content, you have nothing.” The aim of any media is to make the shift from peripheral attention (when you notice something in passing) to focused attention (when you stop and read or look at it). The surest, 100-percent foolproof way of doing that is to offer your reader something that interests them. The Poynter Institute study discovered that people generally only read 25 percent of a newspaper. One of the stories the test group read contained no pictures, no subheadings, and no color. In short, none of the usual devices. But 95 percent of people read it from start to finish. Why? It was about the difficulties of finding a babysitter. So if you’ve got this far, it’s because you wanted to. And now, back to the design tricks.
Published in COLORS: Time