Enlarge and isolate the element you want to rank highest

Increase the size of the element you want to dominate the hierarchy and place it where it competes less with nearby content. For example, make a date or headline larger, move key text away from surrounding text, or place it on a contrasting background so it gains prominence.

Importance shifts with size and location. Larger elements and elements placed away from competing text attract more attention, so changing those properties can raise an element’s rank relative to the rest of the page.

Mechanism: Increasing size and reducing local competition makes the target element stand out more clearly in the overall layout.

Evidence: Across fine-grained poster variants that changed element size and spatial arrangement, predicted and human importance scores over elements stayed aligned, and the paper’s examples show larger or more isolated text gaining prominence (Bylinskii et al., 2017).

Notes: The paper also reports a general trend that larger and more central text and visual elements tend to be more important.

• User Goal: Make one element read as more important than surrounding elements.
• Task: Revise hierarchy in a poster or other single-page graphic design.
• Data: Mixed text and visual elements with stable content but editable size and position.
• Chart Setting: A single-view layout where elements can be moved or resized.
• Audience: Designers adjusting relative emphasis during composition.
• Success Criterion: The intended element ranks above neighboring elements in perceived importance.

Break it when: The decision is mainly between a text element and a visual element whose meaning or quality differs substantially. Why: The paper notes that these harder cases depend on text informativeness and visual quality, not only on size and location.

Sacrifice: Space and balance for other elements. Risk: Over-enlarging one element can flatten the rest of the hierarchy. Mitigation: Apply the size and placement change to the single element whose rank you need to raise.

Mistake: Enlarge the target element but leave it embedded in dense surrounding text. Why it fails: Crowding can keep the target from separating clearly from nearby competitors.

Failure Sign: The intended headline or date is still not the hottest region, or it remains ranked below nearby text. Quick Check: Compare before-and-after importance maps and inspect the target element’s relative rank against neighboring elements. Stronger Test: Score each element by the maximum heatmap value inside its bounds and check whether the target element’s rank increases after the edit.

• Enlarge the target text block.
• Move the target element to a less crowded region of the layout.
• Put the target text on a more contrasting background.
• Reduce nearby competing text around the target element.