4 ways I know to apply ‘Von Restorff’ in product & brand design
There’s just one word ringing in my head since I learned about the Von Restorff principle — UNIQUE.
Here’s a photo of Beyonce assuming a different pose and even wearing a different costume from her dancers. I think it’s same with every artist. The idea is to make them distinct, such that from afar, your attention is first drawn to them. You just know who the headliner is without much mental effort.
The Von Restorff Effect Theory states that “when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered. It could differ by color, size, shape, or texture”.
There’s a common theme in the following photos below. One item stands out from the others.
Bringing this to design, small changes, or distinguishing factors elevate the experience of a product.
The main value proposition of Von Restorff is that it just reduces the stress of having to search through numerous visual materials to identify the most relevant detail.
Let’s go over actual use cases:
- Champion a Price Option
You can just spot the unique option from the above pricing options. And as I’ve said earlier, designers can make this distinctive impression with Shapes, Size, Spacing, Highlighting, Bold/Italic, Underlining — just anything at all, so long it’s different from the other surrounding elements.
In the above examples, you can see the use of Color, Tags, Borders, etc.
2. Spotlight a product from a shelf of products
In these interfaces, there are clear visual indicators (in the form of tags) to allow users quickly identify which product needs their immediate attention.
3. Highlight Key Info in a Text
Many times, I’ve first turned to the bolder text when reading stuff. You can use Bold or Italics to elevate relevant info or keyword from the rest of the text within a particular text box.
This also reminds me of this book I got recently — HOW TO INVEST by Peter Stanyer, Masood Javaid, and Stephen Satchell. The designer in me was hyped at how industry-specific words or phrases were written in bold and explained in the glossary.
4. Create unexpectedness (brand design)
This is my favourite as it relates to brand design. You don’t have to restrict Von Restorff to a group of related items like the other examples. As I said earlier, the main tenet of Von Restorff is being UNIQUE.
Sometimes, to get attention, we have to first understand the surrounding context and see IF & how we can create an element of anomaly or surprise.
Let’s dive into the below example
(Click here for visuals)
Credit: Growth.design
Everyone kinda knows how to spot and possibly dodge Instagram ads and where most ads follow the same pattern on the photo platform, a text or a note becomes the outlier.
More brands have gone on to adopt this concept but the issue with Von Restorff, like any other psychological principle is, it loses its effect when overused. It’s best used sparingly because trying to make too many things stand out diminishes its impact. Whatever is being highlighted must be of utmost importance.
