If you’ve ever worked in design in marketing or advertising, whether online or traditional mediums, you’ll know that clients expect you to come up with creative that works miracles. I’m currently working with a client, for example, who expects me to create ads that will help sell their totally BS money-making, enviro-sucking hotel development as the very greatest of all eco-friendly developments in the history of all hotels ever, which is actually going to save the world. How I plan to do this with just 140 words and a pretty picture is beyond me, really.

There is no foolproof recipe for creating great, believable, attention-grabbing creative. Until now. Great and believable you’ll still have to come up with yourself, but for ‘attention-grabbing’ you can try Feng-GUI (www.feng-gui.com), a website that “generates a visual heatmap” for your creative.

In their own words, “Feng-GUI empowers designers, advertisers and photographers to effectively analyze Attention and Attraction in visuals.” They do this by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of exposure to visuals, then creating heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at. “This offers designers, advertisers and creatives a Pre-testing technology that predicts performance of an image, by analyzing levels of attention, brand effectiveness and placement, as well as breaking down the Flow of Attention.”

Which is all really just a way of saying ‘Hey, test your image on us before you use it to see if it’s going to sell a damn thing.’

To use Feng-GUI, you simply browse for an image using their browsing tool at the top of the home page, then press ‘heatmap’. The image should be less than1MB and either in jpg. or png. format. The site will then bring up the same image you uploaded, just with various colours and numbers on it. The numbers show the order in which a person’s eyes move, while the colours show the quantity of interest – bright blue means minimal interest, aka lose it; and bright red means it’s a main focal point.

Quite nifty really. Especially for those of us who use words like ‘nifty’ when trying to produce world-changing creative.

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