The connection between the eye and the mind is, especially for designers, obscured by common phrases we often use in describing the choices we’ve made, our intent for them, and our analysis of how they work: This arrangement of text and image “draws the eye”; this alignment maintains “line of sight”; this heat-map “tracks the eye” and shows where “

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The eyes are no more important a sense-making tool of the body than the ears, nose, tongue, or skin. Our apprehension of reality is so much more than just seen. And yet, the seen has a much greater share of human culture than the heard, smelled, tasted or felt. That may seem hyperbolic to say, but it has actually been studied! There is quantitative

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Set aside all the academic jargon — these studies are very difficult to read! — and the point is rather stark: our vision and perception are far sharper than is our own awareness of them. We see and understand even when we think we are not. This has major implications for design.

Still, it sounds impossible, doesn’t it? But it is at the root of virt

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The goal of any page, of course, is to retain attention through its two major phases. First, transient attention, which is to say, “the short-term response to a stimulus that distracts attention” and then, second, selective sustained attention, which is conscious focus. A fascinating presumption in differentiating between these two forms of attenti

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As readily as I advise my clients that fewer and fewer lookers will ever become readers, I also encourage them that there is much to be gained from just a look. And I am seeing greater interest on their part in thinking deeply about achieving clarity and simplicity, of packing as much information in as little signal, of being ever more intentional

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And because it has been so effective — stoking desire, after all, is a million times more easily done than satisfying it — virtually every design practice in the digital landscape has taken cues from it. The result is a crowded landscape through which we voluntarily speed, faster and faster, and one in which almost every piece of information is ens

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When Indiana Jones, for example, rapidly scans a room full of cups to find the true Grail, his eyes hardly rest on a single one for more than a tiny fraction of a second. And yet, his brain is calculating, cup, cup, cup, grail? no, no, no faster than he even perceives. It’s all transient attention until his eyes rest upon that humble “cup of a carp

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As it turns out, much of design is about capitalizing on that gap. In the design of objects, understanding the careful balance of mind-body coordination is what makes for useful ones. A good object is not one that you want to be rid of, nor one that functions best when you are distracted. And yet, in the world of visual media, distraction has been

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Our entire body works like that. The majority of physical function is autonomous, which is astounding when you stop to ponder it. You don’t have to consciously tell your eyes to blink, your lungs to breath, your throat to swallow, your legs to hold you up, or your fingertips to feel. Virtually every cell of your body works — can do what it needs to

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