Kress and van Leeuwen point out that visual layout can be divided into different region: the left and the right, the top and the bottom, and the centre and the margin. They suggest multimodal texts organized using the spatial logic of the image often following a structure like this:

To what I have observed, no matter the posters or the websites, many designers make use of Kress and van Leeuwen’s spatial map to draw the attention from the viewers. Let’s see Dior’s advertisement below:

The vector of the poster is clearly towards the middle. The woman looks at the mirror which places in the middle of the poster. Also, the room is full of dark and the brightness in the middle part makes it stand out. It’s obvious that the advertiser wants us to focus on the middle part and it is the dominant part compared to the others. The Dior products are placed on the table and the advertiser wants to imply that if you use their products, you can be a mature and sexy lady like the model too. Your world will become charming and you make a difference surrounding you.

When it comes to the other elements, the logo of Dior is placed at the top of the left margin which means given and ideal. As we all get accustomed to this brand, Dior, it doesn’t need to use a lot of words to describe itself. Just show its brand name is enough and make you buy it to become a fancy member of the customer group.

We can observe that the bottom of the right margin shows the close-up of the new product which is called “poison”. The region of right and bottom represents real and new. That means this “poison” is the new series of Dior and it is available for the customer now. This advertiser encourages the customers to get it for real. I love this name “poison” very much. It seems that when you use, you will unavoidable get addicted to it. And the black color of the perfume bottle give you a feeling of mystery.

 

Some eye-tracking research (Nielsen, 2006) indicates that people approach the reading of a webpage in a number of horizontal and vertical movements which approximate an “F-shaped” pattern. It follows that the text in these regions (top, middle, left) is more likely to be noticed by readers of webpage. I fully support to the writer’s viewpoint that many web designers seem to understand this and often use the top and left of the screen to locate the information that they consider most important. Take facebook website as an example.

The top of the webpage is the logo and login form. It presents that becoming a member of facebook is ideal and the position of the members is at the top of facebook. It seems that being a member of facebook is privilege. It encourages the non-members to aspire to the “ideal” condition of membership. The social networking site facebook is famous nowadays and nearly all the web-users know it. Therefore, the logo of it puts on the top left that represents the information is given and assumes people have a brief image about it. As facebook assumes that we have cultural knowledge about it, we can observe that it doesn’t have any words to describe its function and how to use.

When we focus on the middle part, it is a sign up form. The text size of the form is larger than that of the other part and the sign up form is very simple that it only contains a few questions. It is not surprising that what facebook really concern is how many people sign up and use it. Attracting new potential users to use it is the most important so it put the sign up form in the dominant part of the webpage (the central). The combination of the use of the word “free” and simple design of the sign up form makes the non-members of facebook feel less pressured and it seems that it is easy to join the membership.

Moreover, the left hand side of the middle part shows a picture of mobile phone and using a few words to transmit the message to us that we can stay connected facebook by using mobile phone. It gives us the impression that facebook is known as being really convenient in our life. You can use it no matter where you are. At the bottom of the facebook, they are the information about the company, advertising and privacy etc. Those are what we are rarely interested in so they are placed in the position that is not often noticed by the viewers.

 

In our commercial world, we contact with different advertisementevery day. To the advertiser, how to convey the message that they intend to tell us is very important. Understanding the visual relationship can help them make the advisements more appealing and out-standing. I think every successful company surely has their success reasons. And mostly, they have good structure of advertisements like poster and website that can catch the viewers’ eyes quickly.