A great way to establish visual hierarchy is using contrast. So you can see here, I use contrast to really make an obvious what it is that you should be focusing on on the slide. Fun with PowerPoint, funny guy, that's really a better version of this is that by using things like darker text and a bright yellow with black text on top of it, just by using those to enhance contrast, you're signaling to somebody what it is that they should focus on on the slide. You can also do reverse so you can have white text on a darker background, you can have bright red text as well. So red would be considered sort of more urgent or higher contrast is something that people are going to probably focus on first. So all of these things are ways of using contrast to signal to somebody what it is that they should be looking at. If I asked you what would you look at first if I just showed this to you now, you probably would see this first and then well maybe this one because of the black and yellow and then this one third. Right? So you go left to right which probably is a good way of processing the visual information on the slide so that would be a useful way of organizing this information just by using something like contrast. If a little contrast is good then a lot of contrast must be better right? No not really I wouldn't say so. Okay. You get the idea. Again, this is just a little kind of I don't know visual humor if you want is that, this is kind of hard to look at just forcing you to look at this for a minute is probably not the most pleasant thing because again, you're overloading somebody's brain you're making them look at too many things at once. You trying to figure out what's the subject here and yes they're seeing this kind of text and shape like maybe that's the subject, but this bright yellow background makes somebody go, "Wow! This is super important. I should really be looking at this whole thing all at once." It's almost kind of tiring, because your brain keeps trying to figure out what am I looking at, what's going on here. So obviously you want to avoid that, you want to just use contrast, very strategically use it when it's important when you want to draw attention to something. So for example with this version here, it's really obvious if I just had something like this on the map or on my image, then the person knows that must be the most important thing without having to overload them with a lot of high contrast than the other parts. In terms of contrast on a map, I'm just going to show you some different examples here is that these are the outlines of census tracts in Toronto and this is obviously really low contrast version of the map. I'm hoping you can actually see that there's outline's there, but I made it kinda of a slightly dark beige outline on a later beige background so really not enough contrast this would be frustrating for somebody to look at. If I do this though, obviously I'm color-coding it with some kind of value. But the point is, is that now there are some kind of contrast going on we have contrast between the land and the water, so you can definitely see contrast between those two and then we have contrast between different census tracks within the land and so, it's easy for somebody to start to look at that and see similarities, differences and relationships in terms of trends or what's going on with this map and so by having that, I think it helps somebody just by using something like contrast to be able to interpret that visual hierarchy. This is using color with contrast I'm not saying this is a great map I wouldn't necessarily recommend this but you do have this idea of low, lighter areas versus darker areas in getting this kind of contrast thing happening not sure if this works too well when you're on a lake so, this kind of looks like a rectangular lake since it's almost the same color as Lake Ontario. But I'm just saying this was just meant to show you differences in contrast. Here we don't have a ton of contrast, this is an okay color scheme. I really wouldn't recommend it necessarily what I might do with a map like this is actually make the lake white if I had to or some really dramatic dark blue or there might be some other way of working with this and so we don't really have a lot of contrast on the land. So it's okay, but if it was a base map or a background and I was gonna put something on top of that, this would be okay but on its own there's not really a lot of contrast here, not really enough to make it useful for us. This is too much contrast, this is you've got really dark colors, you used really bold colors, you got a light yellow and a dark blue and these greens. Again, I always think of it like well what's the subject here, what someone's supposed to look at, what are they supposed to see and it's really not clear. So this is a little too much contrast, it's really not going to be that useful or efficient for someone to see that hierarchy. Something as simple as changing the width of a line can help with visual hierarchy and visual contrast. Here we have a road network for part of Toronto, and by having them all the same color in the same line width, it's telling somebody that they're all the same. Remember we're looking for similarities, differences and relationships, right? So there's no contrast, in other words, on this and contrast isn't just about lighter or darker it can be the thickness of a line. All I had to do was change the thickness of the major arterial roads and now we have more visual contrasts we have more information to tell our reader. If somebody's looking at this, more than likely they're going to key in on those thicker lines and why is that important? Because there's probably more people using those, there's higher traffic volume. If I'm trying to navigate the city, it might be easier for me to get around using those roads as opposed to the side roads and so just something as simple as this can increase contrast and make your map more efficient.
