We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Designing a restrained billboard might be rare, and even culturally antonymic, but when it's done right, it's incredibly effective.

Billboard Advertisement for the Denver Water Public Utility

Here, the Denver Water Public Utility takes the Eskom strategy one step further, actually chopping their billboard down to about 20% of its allotted size. This is not only highly effective because it capitalizes negatively on our perceptual fluency for billboards, but it's also quite apropos to the content. Nicely done.

Billboard Advertisement for the BIC

Secondly, this incredible billboard for BIC razors makes excellent use of many of the principles we at DLB hold dear. Specifically, (1) the aforementioned confounding of perceptually fluent expectations, (2) the Power of Profiles (here, capitalizing on the unique and recognizable shape of the BIC disposable razor), (3) the judicious use of the context/environment of the design, and finally (4) a very interesting (sculptural) complication of the figure-ground relationship.^*

All these excellent factors add up to an almost completely blank billboard. Chew on that.

^* Please note also my near-giddiness that this billboard allows me a second occasion to use the Claes Oldenberg tag.

"What happens to a hamburger is what happens to the people."
- Mark Fenske, I Hate Capitalism, Branded Food & the Internet (ruminations from a drive across America).

A standard Fenske blog post takes the form of a letter to his students. Here is an example excerpted in its entirety (sans picture):

Q: What Does the Pilot of an Airliner Do if the Plane Suddenly Drops 2000 Feet?

A: Look up from his newspaper.

Dear Students,
You're not going to get any preparation for this in your classes.
But you should know it.
The key to success in big time advertising: learn to live out of a carryon.
Don't get into this business unless you truly love airplanes.
Merry Christmas.
The holiday dedicated to us not having to get what we deserve.

I quote his post here in verbatim, as I can't think of a more effective advertisement for his inimitable style. He's like Paul Arden, if Arden were a character in a Kafka story.

Among my favorite of his aphorisms: A Promise is an Infomercial, Maybe you suck, and this image, from It's February. Time to let Mr. Wacko in:

His blog is markfenske.com.

Last month, the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) at Wichita State University put out a new eye-tracking study, focused on differences in eye-movement patterns between single- and two-column web pages.

For some reason, I always read these, and inevitably end up frustrated. Not just because of the standard objections to eye-tracking as a useful methodology, but because out of the 20 of them I've read, it feels like numbers 2-20 haven't added anything substantive – or, more importantly, generalizable – to the information I got in the first one, which taught me about the "F"-shaped eye pattern (later popularized as the "golden triangle").

So this time, I was determined to review some of the secondary literature on these studies (in the form of scanning the first page of Google's search results [note to self: touché]), and see if I could generalize the lessons of eye-tracking studies for myself and people like me.

And when I say generalize, I don't mean come up with a Smashing magazine list of "The Top 276 Things Designers Can Learn from Eye-Tracking Studies" that basically recapitulates the bullet points of all the harvested literature verbatim. I'm talking about getting this down to a set of rules of thumb you can write on the back of a business card.

Now, if the post title didn't scare you away, here's your explicit warning: I am a web designer. I make sites that don't tend to be advertising-supported. My problems are very different than the problems of people who have to figure out how to increase click-through at Google, or who sell their expertise at ad-placement. I am honestly concerned with usability here, not revenue. If you want that, here are about 89,400 references for you.

Mutatis mutandis, and without further ado:

1. Use the top left corner.

As indicated back in April of 2006 by the Nielsen group, readers focus hard at the top left corner, and progressively less to the right and down the page. This means that you've got a relatively small piece of your total real-estate to both get your readers hooked on your content and to teach them how to use your site.

This gets exploded into a lot of facts, but the rule here is simple: Don't get creative about where you put your site hooks. If they're not in the top left corner, users are going to leave before they ever find them.

This is, of course, only true for countries and alphabets that read from top left to bottom right, and particularly in languages that allow people to effectively create useful semantic maps by scanning (as opposed to more ideographic alphabets).

Additionally, all of the standard corollaries about short paragraphs, big headlines, preference for single-column layouts, etc. are established by this rule. Assume that your reader is already not paying attention. "This seems consistent with 'Information Foraging Theory' where users are said to hunt for information by 'scent' or navigation and content of the highest value to them." (Spillers, 12-2004)

2. Type size & attention have an inverse relationship.

The data seems to indicate that people read smaller type more carefully.

That said, you're going to need to strike a balance, as left to run amok, this can operate contra to all that good advice about not fatiguing our readers eyes, and about bigger text being "friendlier", etc.

In fact, bigger text is presumably thought friendlier precisely because it invites you (the reader) to scan it easily, and doesn't force you to pay particularly close attention. So, understanding that screen type-design is a negotiation between being better liked (using bigger fonts) and being better read (with smaller fonts), it's clear that you can't just make all your text minute with the hope that it will force your readers into a trance-like focus on your every word.

You can't, that is, unless you have a 250px-wide readable column.

3. Pretty bird!

Finally, there is apparently some evidence that people will look more carefully at images if they are (a) big, and if (b) they contain a person's face.

You talkin' to me? Pretty bird!

We're calling this "Pretty bird!", because I am pretty sure this is an Amygdala-level reaction that operates similarly to a parakeet staring at itself in the mirror. We like to look at big, clear pictures of people. We can sympathize.

Mission Accomplished!

In this (first) installment of Less is Better, take a gander with us at a billboard for a South African utility, and a movie poster for Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

An enormous amount of negative space, clean and simple type, and the clever use of environmental elements make this billboard from South African electricity public utility Eskom, Africa's largest producer of electricity, a shining example in a design field plagued by some of the most flatly unpleasant visual elements of our global visual culture.

This brilliant movie poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey manages to distill an incredible amount of information into a simple black rectangle: The monolith. Compare to these, which look positively garish by comparison.