If you read the pages on the grid and arrangement, you already know that you can give more prominence to some elements in publication or in a visualisation, simply by putting it in the top left corner of the design. This is an example of creating visual hierarchy: telling the reader what to look at first, what to look at after that, and what to look at in the end.
Many ways of creating visual hierarchy in a publication and in a visualisation design exist:
- position element in the x and y dimensions
- layering elements on top of each other in the z dimension
- using the size of elements
- using colour
- highlight elements by enclosing them