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Visual Communication

Below the Picture

·6 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

A caption sits nearer to a picture than any other text on the page. For more than sixty years that position has carried a large claim: that about twice as many people read the captions as read the body copy.1 The claim comes out of advertising practice, and its author named no study behind it.1 The eye-tracking work usually produced in its support says the opposite about screens.2 In Poynter’s Eyetrack III, photographs were not where readers typically entered a news home page, and the study compared no caption position with any other.2 Still, the subject deserves an essay, on a narrower argument: that below the picture is a convention, and that a caption earns its place by telling the reader what to conclude.

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • Paper and screen disagree
  • The ratio, and what counts as read
  • Below, by convention
  • A caption that says what to conclude
  • Setting it
  • Write it as the one sentence they will read

About the book

Notes

  1. Ogilvy 1963, ch. 7, “How to Illustrate Advertisements and Posters” (ch. starts p. 115; page of the sentence not confirmed); Ogilvy 1983, ch. 11, pp. 137–142 (twice as many); ch. 7, about p. 90 (four times as many). Graded as practice rather than research. The 1963 book gives twice as many; the 1983 book gives twice in one chapter and four times in another, and neither book gives the underlying readership figures, the sample, or the study the ratio came from. Evidence C: professional practice or tradition.
  2. Outing 2004, At the core: Homepage layout; What about article layout, writing style? (text elements viewed before the accompanying photo); Outing 2004, Home-page and article-page findings; Nielsen 2010, Summary and opening sections. Eyetrack III studied news websites, not printed pages, and its photograph finding is stated as a reversal of Poynter’s own 1990 print result. Nielsen’s eye-tracking is also a screen study: users ignored decorative images and studied informative ones. Evidence B: one credible study, or evidence with limits.

Sources

  • Ogilvy, D. (1963). Confessions of an Advertising Man. New York: Atheneum. openlibrary.org
  • Ogilvy, D. (1983). Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Crown. Also checked in the 1985 Vintage reprint (index page numbers identical). openlibrary.org
  • Outing, S. (2004). Eyetrack III: What News Websites Look Like Through Readers' Eyes. The Poynter Institute, 24 August 2004. poynter.org
  • Outing, S. (2004). Eyetrack III: What news websites look like through readers' eyes. Poynter Institute. poynter.org
  • Nielsen, J. (2010, October 31). Photos as Web Content. Nielsen Norman Group. nngroup.com

Further reading