Writing/Reading Direction and Organization of Graphic Design

For this week's History of Graphic Design field journal, students were asked to research further into something that inspired them from the reading. Throughout the assigned chapters, something that stuck out to me was the direction of writing. Writing evolved not only in how it was designed (whether pictographs or alphabets), but also how it was displayed and intended to be read. Writing could be displayed vertically, horizontally, or even on a spiral, as shown on the Phaistos Disk of the Minoan civilization.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The printed images or alphabets may be read from right-to-left or left-to-right, and different cultures adopted different methods for the display of their languages. At one point, the Greeks even adopted a method called "boustrophedon" which intends for the work to be read continuously. The first sentence can begin from left-to-right, but the next sentence will begin right-to-left to keep the eye from jumping back to the beginning,

Source: Wikimedia Commons

 Western cultures followed the lead of Greek civilization, which ultimately adopted a left-to-right horizontal direction of reading and writing. Arabic and Hebrew are examples of languages written and read in a right-to-left horizontal direction, and Chinese and Japanese may be written and read in either a right-to-left vertical direction, or a left-to-right horizontal direction, which the more modern writings have adopted.

I wanted to read a little more about reading direction and in doing so, discovered something interesting. Quite a few studies have been done on the effect reading direction may have on perceptual biases, spatial cognition, and even preference for image location.

A study by Ting Ting Chan and Benjamin Bergen (2005) found that English and Chinese speakers were more likely to remember images shown in the top left of a screen, while Taiwanese speakers were more likely to remember an image shown on the top right. (p. 3)

The abstract of a study by Austen Smith and Lorin Elias (2013) stated that their research found a difference in how reading direction influenced preference for left or right lit image, the direction in which circles were drawn, and the proximity to center a line is drawn when bisecting a circle.

All of this makes me wonder how reading direction can affect the reception and success of graphic designs. I have not yet located any studies into this specific topic from my perfunctory research, but I would hypothesize that the layout and construction of a design could benefit from taking into account how reading direction can impact the perception of design. It would seem reasonable to suspect that an advertisement created by a native left-to-right reader for an audience of the same could be less effective or visually appealing to an audience of right-to-left readers. It is something I am curious to look further into as we progress into more modern eras of study, and determine if I can spot a significant difference between design layouts by culture and reading direction.


Chan, T.T., & Bergen, B. (2005). Writing direction influences spatial
cognition. Retrieved from http://www2.hawaii.edu/~bergen/papers/f895-chan.pdf

Smith, A.K., & Elias, L.J. Native reading direction and corresponding preferences for left- or right-lit images. [Abstract]. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 116(2), 355-367. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24032316