Convincing, and commanding attention
Merit: reasoned, clear, sustained
- Merit is awarded for creating the text convincingly, which the standard unpacks as reasoned, clear and sustained. Those are three separate demands and they fail separately, so test them one at a time. Merit does not mean better made — craft does not compensate for a failure in any of the three.
- Reasoned means the text supports what it claims with evidence a viewer can check: a date, a count, a duration, a name. The specific over the general — one named street, not our towns. The measured over the felt. The shown over the stated.
- A text with no facts in it cannot be reasoned, however moving. This is the commonest reason a visually strong submission stalls at Achieved.
- Clear means the viewer knows what they are looking at, in the order you intended, without you present.
- Clarity here is mostly hierarchy. If every element carries the same weight, the viewer supplies their own order — the one you did not design.
- Clear is not simple. A complex text is clear if each unit resolves before the next arrives. The cold test is the only real check — watch which frame they skip.
- Sustained is spatial here, because a still text has no duration — it means across the whole surface and the whole set, with construction and development both still holding in the final unit. It fails at three predictable sites: the final frame, made last and reworked least; the footer or edge; and the paths nobody takes.
Why the end is the weakest part
- The sag is procedural, not creative. Everything you do to a text starts at the beginning — the plan, each rework pass, each proofread. After five passes, frame one has had five and frame four one.
- Assertion is what a maker produces when the material runs out. Facts are finite and expensive, so the strongest go first; when they are gone, a claim costs nothing and feels like an ending. The last unit is therefore unsustained and unreasoned at once, from one cause.
- Four repairs, all changes to the order of work: count concrete detail per unit (a count falling 8, 4, 4, 0 locates the sag objectively); revise backwards; design the last unit first; and give the ending its own session.
- Repair by matching register, not by adding force. The repair for a slogan ending is the same plain register carrying one new fact.
Excellence: the glance and the stay
- Excellence is awarded when the visual text commands attention. Read it literally: it is a claim about what a viewer does. The test is behavioural — does a viewer who owed you nothing stop, stay and finish? And it is added to the Achieved requirements, not substituted for them.
- There are two problems, not one. A visual text is glanced at, and everything usually taught about attention answers that glance. But developing ideas requires the viewer to stay, so attention rewards immediacy and development requires duration. Excellence wins the glance and then earns the time.
- Winning the glance: one thing, hard cropped, comprehensible instantly. One concrete object beats a scene, because a scene has to be searched. Contrast stops an eye. Leave one thing unresolved, and do not spend the idea in the first unit.
- Earning the stay: make the last unit reframe the first; let the constant element do the holding; use restraint where the material is loudest, because a viewer supplying the feeling is still looking; and answer the question you raised.
Six substitutes markers recognise
- More elements per frame, louder design, a longer text, music doing the emotional work, explanation, and technical polish.
- Each fails for its own reason. Every added element flattens the hierarchy, so the frame becomes both less striking and slower to read. Intensity self-defeats, because attention responds to contrast and a text at maximum volume has no peaks. Eight frames is usually four of development and four of padding. Body text is read last or never. And polish touches neither requirement, because both are properties of arrangement.
Worked Example
Worked Example
Two texts on the same subject — a public pool cutting its hours — both described specifically for this page. Which commands attention, and why?
Answer:
1 — the glance. A wins it decisively: one dominant image, extreme contrast, three words readable across a corridor. B wins it weakly — a small, low-contrast timetable.
2 — the stay. After two seconds A offers nothing, because CLOSED TO YOU is the whole argument and the image confirms it. B is still opening: the crossed-out column raises a question, frame 2 answers half of it, frame 3 supplies a comparison, frame 4 answers the rest and reframes frame 1. A spent its idea in the first second, which is the trade it made to win the glance.
3 — B against the criteria. Frame 1 says a timetable has been changed; frame 4 says eleven children lost the only slot their class could use. Different sentences, and reordered the set breaks. Concrete detail runs 3, 6, 5, 6 — no sag, so B is reasoned and sustained too.
4 — where B's attention work sits. All four devices are forms of not showing something yet: the unresolved column; the person arriving late; the same camera position twice, so the frame itself is the constant element; and the number withheld until the last line.
5 — judgement. A commands the glance and cannot hold it; B forfeits some of the glance and holds everything it wins. B reaches Excellence and A cannot, because Excellence sits on top of develops, sustains and structures. The 120-point type is not why A fails; the failure is that the type says everything. The cheapest repair to A is a second panel — same photograph, same position, captioned This is Tuesday at ten past four. Two frames turn a statement into a comparison.