About seven years ago, I learned a great lesson from a great person. Peter Quinn, my then Art Director, and current friend, told me to squint at my designs. Squinting at a design shows you the work’s focal point. It also gives you a different sense of how space and texture is used (and hopefully balanced).

The science behind this method was delightfully dodgy and obscure. I didn’t question it much because he had a lot of experience and he had every client eating out of his hand. And when I used it, I saw things about my designs that I didn’t before.

In fact, this method worked so well for me that for the past five years, I have been pushing my students to do the squint.

Today, I read an article by Matt Queen published on Boxes and Arrows. In this article, Matt writes about how our “visual system encodes information using many channels in to major pathways:

1. The magnocellular pathway (M pathway, or “big neurons”) contains channels sensitive to gross shape, luminance, and motion.

2. The parvocellular pathway (P pathway—“small neurons”) contains channels sensitive to color and detailed shape (Nicholls et al, 1992)”

Matt points out that the only tool designers have to use to assess the M pathway is the squint test. Finally, the science behind the technique is revealed: “squint your eyes to obstruct sharp focus and rely mostly on dark and light values.” It makes enough sense for me to buy, but he continues to say, “However, the squint test is not very practical for HCI and Usability assessments” because of the space between elements and the size of icons.

The article is mainly about how to design better icons by understanding how the eye and brain interpret the information. Powerful stuff. But as you would imagine, my question is this: shouldn’t graphic designers substitute the word “icon” for “billboard” or “print ad” or “TV commercial” or… err?… well, you get the idea.

This article is definitely worth the read. It is amazing how scientific design can get. I for one will probably use this new method a couple of times to see how it goes. But I have to tell you; I am biased to the squint. It works so well.

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posted by Andres Zapata @ 3:03 PM