Here's how you can incorporate nonverbal communication into commercial design.

Understanding visual hierarchy is the first step in incorporating nonverbal communication into commercial design. You direct viewers 'attention and emphasize important messages by strategically arranging elements like size, contrast, and placement. This improves the impact and usability of your designs overall by ensuring that important information is effectively and intuitively communicated.

Whether it is a business card, a poster or even a whole website the purpose of a design is to visually take the viewer on a journey. It is the art of guiding the viewer through that journey in a logical manner visually. Ways that you can do this: 1. SIze: Make important stuff bigger. It's like yelling, but classier. 2. Contrast and colour: More than just dark on light. Think about colour and tones to convey emotion, and highlight a specific point or message. 3. Alignment: A cluttered design often means a muddied message- a grid system works well. 4. Use of white space to give your elements room to breathe. Good use of visual hierarchy will not only make your message clearer but also more memorable.

In the world of commercial design, color psychology is crucial for nonverbal communication. Different colors affect how viewers perceive and interact with a design by evoking particular feelings and associations. You can create the desired feelings and deliver subtle messages by choosing colors that correspond to the brand's identity and appeal to the intended audience. This makes your designs more visually appealing and effective, giving viewers a memorable and interesting viewing experience.

We have all heard the saying "A picture paints a thousand words" but sometimes that is easy to forget. As powerful as words are, an image can communicate so much all in one go and just hit different There is a reason that we are drawn to visuals in designs, they capture the attention and give off so much information to your brain that it is hard to forget an image, even the bad ones, so they need to be the right visuals otherwise they distract from your message and can cheapen your brand. The images you choose should effectively communicate your message and thus make it more memorable....for the right reasons.

In addition to gestalt principles we can also consider the role of primary metaphors. These operate on a subconscious level and are based on correspondences between different dimensions of experience. For example when things are close together they often share some level of similarity. Choosing to place an image next to a word therefore can suggest that we are asserting a relationship between them - that they are similar, or that one is relevant to the other. This is an example of the primary metaphor ‘similarity is alignment’ and we often employ such primary metaphors without being aware that we are doing so. There are many such metaphors that relate to design practice, another one related to similarity being ‘similarity is alignment’.