Visual hierarchy

For example, one study found that when people agree that a graphic design is good, they exhibit more similar eye movements; measured by the Fréchet distance.

[2] The concept of visual hierarchy is based in Gestalt psychological theory, an early 20th-century German theory that proposes that the human brain has innate organizing tendencies that “structure individual elements, shapes or forms into a coherent, organized whole,” especially when processing visual information.

[4] When an element in a visual field disconnects from the ‘whole’ created by the brain's perceptual organization, it “stands out” to the viewer.

The "squint test" is often suggested as a simple, if unscientific, method to evaluate the visual hierarchy of a graphical product like a map or web page.

[8] When viewed out of focus (or from a great distance), the viewer is not distracted by details, but can only see overall (gestalt) patterns such as visual hierarchy.

One could compare visual hierarchy in graphic design to grammatical structure in writing in terms of the importance of each principle to these fields.

A representation of hierarchical feature extraction and combination in the visual system.
In this 1905 map, the rivers and parks are at the top of the visual hierarchy due to color contrast and size, the title stands out due to size and alignment, and to a lesser degree, the central city stands out due to character, because the angled street pattern contrasts with the rest of the grid. Even the empty space in West Denver attracts attention due to its contrast with the overall complexity of the map and its central position. The individual streets and their names are at the bottom of the visual hierarchy due to lack of contrast, even though that was probably the intended primary purpose of the map.