Content may be king, but in web design, visual hierarchy is right up there on the throne. This design principle lays the foundation for visitors’ website experiences and allows your site’s story to unfold.
Developing a strong visual hierarchy web design is the key to creating a successful and memorable user experience (UX). Creating hierarchy can enhance many aspects of your site, from its dropdown menu to its overall visual structure. This principle can be applied in numerous ways and to great effect.
In this guide, we will answer the question, " What is visual hierarchy in web design?” We will also explore some cornerstone visual hierarchy methodologies and delve into effective visual hierarchy web design examples to ensure your web pages are visually pleasing and engaging for every visitor.
Exploring the Concept of Visual Hierarchy in Design
So, what is visual hierarchy in web design?
Visual hierarchy is a methodology that allows designers to organise different design elements on a website by order of importance. This, in turn, creates a user experience that draws visitors’ attention to the key visual characteristics of a website and the essential elements you most want users to interact with. These elements can include buttons, images, videos, or text, among other aspects.
Visual hierarchy design features like bold typography, negative space, and bright logos can all draw visitors’ attention to certain aspects of a website and add more visual weight to designs.
However, the placement of these elements is just as important as the elements themselves.
Consider where you may naturally seek out information on a website you're using for the first time. Most people will follow reading patterns that instinctively start at the top of a web page and view larger, more eye-catching elements before checking out smaller elements and fine print.
In the web design industry, visual hierarchy is used to guide user flow and attention. That’s why designers at a web design agency use tried-and-tested methods to place vital elements like calls to action (CTAs) and contact details in places visitors are more likely to see first. They also separate them with ample white space to create balanced designs.
This increases the chances of visitors taking certain positive actions, like selecting CTA buttons or clicking on the ‘Contact’ button to contact a website’s customer support or sales teams.
The Importance of Creating Visual Hierarchy Web Design
Visual hierarchy web design is one of the four primary aspects of visual design principles for websites that affect performance. The other three key concepts are scale, space, and contrast.
Combined, these principles create a meaningful and intentional connection between design elements like typography and images. They organise a website’s layout in a strategic way, guiding users towards specific actions or goals or highlighting must-see messages and offers.
Using effective visual hierarchy may offer other benefits, too. For instance, visual hierarchy may help attract users' attention, foster improved user engagement rates, and help visitors navigate your content easily.
Simplified navigation means that users will be better able to identify and absorb essential information and take certain desirable actions, such as making purchases, reaching out to customer support, or filling out a contact form.
Additionally, the visual hierarchy methodology helps to build a scannable website layout while ensuring that critical content and elements stand out. It can help to engage visitors more rapidly and readily with your site's visual elements, which can have subsequent benefits for customer acquisition rates, sales, and customer satisfaction.
A web design agency can also design attractive and functional websites without using visual hierarchy. However, disregarding hierarchy in your web layouts may reduce your site’s readability and usability. If any of your web pages are experiencing high bounce rates, redesigning them according to the rules of visual hierarchy may reduce these bounce rates and re-engage your target audience.
The Core Principles of Visual Hierarchy in Design
Seven core visual hierarchy principles are widely found in prime visual hierarchy web design examples. Using these principles and other tools, a web design agency can enhance the UX and readability of your websites, making them simple to navigate.
1. Patterns of Reading
Web designers tend to use two main reading layouts for their sites: the F and Z patterns. These reading patterns reflect the natural habits of the viewer's eye; particularly Western users, who read from left to right.
Designers use these visual hierarchy formats to organise information and visual elements in a strategic way, telling a story that seems logical and natural to readers while leaving plenty of white space to break up long walls of text.
The Z pattern website layout starts by drawing visitors’ attention to the top left side of a page before moving across to the top right corner. Readers then observe a page down towards the bottom left-hand side of the screen and across towards the bottom right-hand corner as a final focal point. Every corner will contain a visual cue like a CTA button or a logo to capitalise on this natural reading habit.
The F pattern layout tends to be more visually complex. It leads visitors’ eyes from left to right on the screen and then back again. This layout is best used for pages that contain large volumes of text, punctuated, of course, with negative space to create a clear visual hierarchy.
2: The Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds is a widely used concept in many different forms of design, from photography and videography to web design. It’s also used extensively in visual hierarchy.
This rule is based on a grid formation and leading lines that divide a screen vertically and horizontally into thirds, creating four intersecting points. Placing key elements at these intersections or along leading lines creates focal points that add harmony and balance to a visual design and establish pleasing visual relationships between these elements.
3: Scale and Size
Visual hierarchy in design uses scale and size to prioritise information in a visual way. An element’s size refers to its physical dimensions on a screen, while scale defines its proportions relative to other included elements.
Bigger elements tend to command more of a user's attention, while smaller ones are usually viewed later in the experience.
For instance, featuring larger elements like a sizeable logo or image on a landing page creates an immediate focal point, while other elements like contact buttons and social media elements can be combined at smaller scales to allow other details (like product images and header texts) to take centre stage.
Experimenting with scale and size helps create a sense of perspective for website visitors, guiding their focus toward the most important details on a page before they discover secondary elements.
4: Colour and Contrast
Colour and contrast are two essential web design features that guide visitors to the elements of a page you want them to view first. High-contrast CTA buttons and vibrant colour combinations, for example, will pop against white spaces and muted backgrounds. Contrasting colours can also help draw the eye.
Likewise, colourful images and illustrations will add visual appeal to your web pages while communicating vital brand information and highlighting important elements. Using your colour and contrast palette strategically in line with visual hierarchy allows essential information to stand out without deviating from a brand’s core visual identity.
5: Typography
Typography is a visual hierarchy principle that uses strategic font choices and typeface sizes to emphasise highlights in text. Ideas that need to stand out should be highlighted in bold or large typefaces to ensure that visitors see them immediately.
Supplementary text is usually made smaller or in a simpler font to allow key ideas to stand out. Most visual hierarchy web design examples use typography hierarchies. These begin with large, eye-catching headlines and then move towards mid-sized subheadings and smaller paragraphs of body text to create a natural flow.
6: White Space
Adding too many elements to your web pages can create visual clutter and complicate your graphic design. Also known as negative space, white space balances the visual appearance of web pages by keeping different design elements uncluttered and body text legible.
Keeping white spaces between certain elements can help site visitors to absorb important details without becoming overwhelmed or distracted. Moreover, negative spaces add more visual weight to certain elements, turning them into functional visual cues to create a good visual hierarchy.
7: Repetition and Proximity
The human brain is wired to look for patterns in visual information.
Positioning web elements in close proximity to each other – or organising them through the use of design patterns – allows visitors to understand how certain elements are related to each other and what purposes they serve.
For example, in the case of a website with a blog, organising blog posts one after another or side by side shows your readers that they are all blog posts and serve similar purposes. These forms of visual hierarchy examples group design elements in a way that feels logical and intuitive to users.
Likewise, repeating vital elements like calls to action emphasises their importance and ensures that your visitors are more likely to take desired actions, like checking out your site’s online store or contacting its sales team.
Visual Hierarchy in Design: A Summary
Visual hierarchy web design concepts help web designers create natural, intuitive visitor experiences on every web page. By using visual hierarchy in design methodologies, a site tells a personalised story and captures the user's attention
Visual design is a communication tool that can effectively convey core ideas to web users, and visual hierarchy examples provide an excellent framework for creating captivating and highly effective designs.
Choose a web design agency that can use the seven visual hierarchy in design principles listed above to create visual hierarchy. This will take your designs to a new level and secure the engagement rates you're looking for.
Ryde is a full-service web design agency that develops and designs winning websites. If you need to create hierarchy or have any other web design needs, please get in touch. We can help!