An exploratory study of the effect of enclosed structure on type design with fixation dispersion: evidence from eye movements

Abstract

Type design is the process of re-organizing visual elements and their corresponding meanings into a new organic entity, particularly for the highly logographic Chinese characters whose intrinsic features are retained even after reorganization. Due to this advantage, designers believe that such a re-organization process will not affect Chinese character recognition. However, not having an effect on recognition is not the same as not affecting the viewing process, especially when the character is so highly deconstructed that, along with the viewing process, the original intention of the design and its efficacy are both indirectly affected. Therefore, besides capturing the changes of character features, a good type designer should understand how characters are viewed. Past studies have found that character structure will affect character recognition, particularly for enclosed and non-enclosed characters whose differences are significant, although the interpretation of such differences remains open for discussion. This study explored the viewing process of Chinese characters with eye-tracking methods and calculated the concentration and saccadic amplitude of fixation in the viewing process in terms of the descriptive approach in a geographic information system, so as to investigate the differences among types of character modules with the spatial dispersion index. This study found that the overall vision when viewing enclosed structures is more concentrated than non-enclosed structures.