Visual hierarchy: what to get right first

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you only fix one thing about visual hierarchy this quarter, make it the first item below.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Start here

Every screen should have one obvious first thing to look at. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Then this

Size, weight, and colour do the work that arrows and boxes cannot. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Eventually

If everything is emphasised, nothing is. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

How to tell if yours is fine

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about visual hierarchy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• If everything is emphasised, nothing is — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.