Feature Hierarchy

The above photo shows two book covers for the Asylum Monograph, a book covering the 11-year portfolio of layout and print from the creative team at Asylum in Singapore. Being that both examples use several circles on the cover, the design needed to utilize other feature channels to distinguish what is important or where our attention should be directed. On the right, color is used as a preattentive channel as it immediately stands out among the rest of the circles. However, the cover on the left uses color in all of the circles making it difficult to preattentively detect that feature channel. Instead, we rely on the size of the circles and our attention is directed at the largest circle. In comparing the two covers, we can see that color is a more dominant feature channel than size. My attention is immediately directed to the red circle among several other black circles, but it takes a little longer to find the larger red circle among several other circles filled with color.  Feature channel hierarchies are being used on the left hand cover, even though color isn’t necessarily at the top. Size directs us to the largest circle, but the red is helpful as it is a bright color. Next, shape and color is used to direct us to the other circles which have slightly less important information, but details the designer wanted to highlight. In addition to the shape and color of the circle with the title, the bold font displays the color and size feature channels. If the font was any color other than white or small and not bold, it wouldn’t pop out as much. The two book covers use different feature channels and help prove that color is more powerful than size in the hierarchy.