This series of film posters designed by La Boca (http://site.laboca.co.uk/Black-Swan) are redesigns of a the 2010 film Black Swan.  I think that these posters are a very representative of the feature hierarchy and uses various visual feature channels of color, shape, depth cues and size.  The stark contrast of the each of the posters with the use of only three colors red, white and black, give off a very blunt dark tone that is actually very representative of the themes in the film.  The bottom two have a strong sense of movement which is a reference to what the film is about which is ballet dancing and quick movement.  What I like about the top two is the depth created by the double meanings of the images that have hidden ones that you only notice after you pick out the initial feature hierarchy of the dark tones first like the black and then you can later notice the smaller detail in the white and the use of negative space.

Visual Perception 1 / Top-Down Visual Processing

This multicolored contour sketch done by artist and illustrator  Charmaine Olivia demonstrates a few of the many components and principles of top down visual processing.  The main silhouette is the focal point of the image and the first thing we notice and so we make the biased decision to notice it first because it uses the boldest color contrast. The artist does this so that we can first remain fixated on the main subject.  From there, our scan path moves to down to the smaller detail of other body silhouettes drawn on the body on the large scale figure.  Our eyelids are forced to make rapid saccades because of all of the tiny lines overlapping each other all throughout the image and the mixing of fatter and skinnier lines and hidden elements that you slowly start to notice.  This kind of approach to design and illustration is present in many of the artist's works. (sketches from <http://www.charmaineolivia.com/portfolio/artwork/>)

Design Success and Failure / Syntactical Guidelines

This is one of the posters for the AIGA/NY 30th Anniversary (American Institute of Graphic Arts/New York Chapter.) It is very minimalist and bold but also holds important information and follows many syntactical guidelines. The focal point being the Empire state building, gives us information about what the poster is about but it also makes the design feel very balanced by arranging the three elements in a triangular shape. All of the elements in the design feel very balanced and harmonious and there is also a form on positive and negative patterns because of the contrasting colors. 


The poster below is also for the AIGA/NY 30th Anniversary but it has a very different design concept that focuses on stress and perception. Although there is a lot of tension I feel that it is still successful because it is making an impact and is still legible, but gives it a chaotic look because of the grouping of the type/information.  The vibrant color palette used makes for a very high impact design but at the same time the simplicity of the font and background give it a nice balance at the same time.