• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, November 13, 2004

Quantifiable Aesthetics Proposed by Xerox Researcher

According to a Xerox Corporation researcher, when it comes to conveying meaning, how a document looks can be as critical as the words it carries, says new research investigating document "intents" and the impact of cross-media design as a document moves between paper and digital displays.

Steven J. Harrington, a research fellow in Xerox's Imaging and Services Technology Center, said "Whether a ballot is displayed on a touch-screen monitor or printed on paper, its effectiveness depends on attributes such as design, the user's comfort with the technology, whether it is easy to find necessary information, and feedback about completion - values that are all quite independent of the content. However, the intent in either format is the same -- effectively facilitating action."

Harrington and his colleagues have identified more than 150 measurable value functions, including density of the text, colorfulness of images, regularity of positioning of images, and diversity of font and typeface, that a designer can use to convey the intent of a document. But their research explores the idea that although style is measured in a large number of value properties, those can be clustered into a relatively small number of intents.

This finding has implications for the field of automatic document conversion. Because today's diversity of presentation methods makes any single fixed output appearance obsolete, Harrington envisions a transformation matrix. It would permit a document prepared for one type of display space to be analyzed so that its intents could be expressed accurately and automatically in the style space of another medium.

Among the quantifiable factors they found that could produce aesthetically pleasing layouts were alignment, regularity, uniform separation, balance, proportion of white space, height to width proportion, uniformity and "page security" - the positioning of small objects so they don't appear to be falling off a page.

"While application of these principles can yield pleasing results, we found that the combination of factors is not strictly additive," Harrington said. "In fact, one bad aesthetic feature can cause disproportionate harm to the overall appearance."

You can find out more here.