so today i've got something to share with you guys that can really change how designers
approach a design i've been granted access to some cutting edge technology
which is going to help designers refine the artwork on the basis of whoever views that
artwork within the first three to five seconds so this a short period of time in that first three to
five seconds when somebody views your designs is really fundamental to the success of your design
thereafter so i'm going to run you through this software and how it can help you in this first
three to five seconds of people viewing your work and why it's so important so vas is a
really really nifty and a new program it uses complex algorithms to determine where a viewer's
eye is going to travel and how they're going to perceive your design in that short period
of time at the very beginning so the initial grab or the initial attention hook is really crucial
and also it's important to know how to guide your viewer around the design
so there are four key elements involved when talking about this kind of initial three to five
seconds those biological markers are first edges and then we have contrasting colors mainly red
and green contrasting and then blue and yellow and then of course intensity and finally human
faces now this is universal to everybody around the world no matter where they are from their
culture or anything else that you can think of this is something ingrained into human psychology
it's hardwired into our brains and so wouldn't it be really useful to have a software or a program
that can help us kind of engage a viewer and hack into their you know responses in his first
three to five seconds when someone looks at your designs so vs by 3m comes in both desktop and also
a built-in photoshop extension but let's take a look at the desktop version first and foremost
so on the website it states that the accuracy of vs is 92 which is very very high and so
here is the photoshop plug-in download and we're going to take a look at that later okay so once
you've signed up and logged into the desktop version you simply need to upload a design
and there are categories for you to choose from such as print design packaging even the ability
to analyze how efficient an email is going to be so that's obviously going to be really great
for those of you who are marketers or focus on marketing via emails because you can actually
learn how efficient your emails are in terms of grabbing attention but i'm going to take a
look at a landing page website that i've mocked up today there are five key sections that vs looks at
and the first is the areas of interest that i'm actually going to come back to
later but as you can see here on my heat map it shows the probability of areas of my
design that are going to be noticed within the first three to five seconds now the hotter the
color is the more interest or the more chance that a viewer is going to stay on this spot
now hotspots are a lot like the heat map but instead of just colors we are given a probable
percentage which dictates you know what's the likelihood the viewer is going to stay or notice
this part of your design now if you are making a landing page with key information you of course
want to make sure that is seen and also noticed so this really does help now the next section is the
gaze sequence which is one of my favorite parts of ves so did your eyes actually travel from one two
three to four when you looked on my landing page it most probably did and again leading your viewer
around your design is key to ensuring your viewer has comfortable flow and the message is delivered
properly so lastly we have visual features which is going to make some more sense in a moment
so i'm going to head back to my design and re-analyze it
so before you actually analyze the design you can highlight an area with this tool like i'm
doing here i can then tell vas that this is a face or i can actually draw a box around a
specific area of interest to me the designer so i might think it's important for the viewer to look
here and then to pay some attention so now when i come to analyze my design this area of interest
as a whole is given a probability score and 81 is pretty good but it could be better so what i could
do maybe is to work on color contrast or something else to make sure it's more visible to the viewer
but yeah coming back into the visual features we can see the overall score of my area of interest
it has a pretty high score on edges yet the color contrast and the lack of faces brings it
down of course i don't want to add faces to my topography but i could work on the contrasting
color and intensity somewhat so that was a desktop version but wouldn't it be cool if you could use
this tool whilst you're actually designing well the photoshop plugin can be downloaded here and
it's pretty straightforward to install so let's head over to photoshop and see it in action
so i have a new landing page design here and i can access the plugin in the top drop down menu
so again i have a choice of categories to choose from and if you want to make an area
of interest like we did in desktop version you actually need to use the rectangle tool like so
so analyzing my targeted area we can see that the visibility score here is 68
which is okay but it certainly could be better as a designer it tells me that i need to work
on this area in terms of visibility and in the heat map of my design most of the attention is
over to the phone on the right and that might not be the desired intention that i want to achieve
so it might be something to think about and change and hotspots are giving me real-time information
on what the probability is of each section grabbing attention in the viewer and again
there could be a lot of work to actually focus on my design to make it more efficient
and my gaze sequence i wouldn't say is ideal and i would need to make some adjustments maybe have
the phone on the left and then the text content on the right so that way the viewer does travel
from the left to the right and then also make the text more visually contrasting and appealing
so vas is all about giving yourself some real time data on how your design is measuring up in terms
of being effective and attention grabbing in those first three to five seconds and having it plugged
into photoshop is really useful so the first three to five seconds are often that initial hook
that designers and marketing agencies really want to make use of this doesn't apply to every
single aspect of design it does apply to some aspects more than others such as marketing web
page design brochures you know things that need a call to action or something like that and on this
channel i have spoken a lot about hierarchy and how to lead a viewer around your design well this
tool literally shows you your artwork in real time and how it's actually stepping up to the plate and
meeting or not meeting those preferences there is a promotional code that i can give to my followers
that will offer five extra free trial credits and that is when you sign up to vas for free
when you do sign up for free you have 10 credits but you're going to have 15 if you use my code
thomas to redeem this offer now you can find the link down below and head over to vas today
and if you want to learn something else about graphic design do click
a video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace
you