In an excellent presentation on catalog design at last week’s Mailorder Gardening Association conference, Lisa Hodgson Balch of Sargeant House Design Studio explained how the concept of “gaze motion” is especially important in the gardening world.
In a nutshell, gaze motion means that if there are people on a printed page or website, the reader’s eye will tend to go wherever the people are looking. Consequently, you need to position people facing towards where you want the reader to look – not looking off the page.
Lisa quite rightly pointed out that flowers can have gaze motion, too, either because of the direction they lean, or because they have an obvious “front” like a sunflower. Always make sure that you place flowers, as well as people, facing in a direction that will keep your reader engaged with your content.
