Visual weight
also: visual dominance
Visual weight is how much an element pulls the eye relative to its neighbors, driven by size, contrast, color, and isolation. The heaviest element on a page wins the first fixation — whether or not it carries your message.
Every element competes for attention with a 'weight' the eye computes automatically before any reading happens. A large, high-contrast image outweighs a small grey headline, which is why so many pages accidentally lead the eye to decoration instead of the value proposition.
Designing visual hierarchy is really about assigning weight deliberately: make the one thing that matters heaviest, and dim everything around it. A saliency model exposes the weight the eye actually perceives, which often differs from what the designer intended.
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