The answer, it turns out, is more complicated and more interesting than a straightforward yes. The researchers found that three design variables—color harmony, graphic style, and layout configuration—do influence how attractive viewers perceive a cover to be. But when they compared those subjective judgments against objective measurements of gaze behavior, the two layers of evidence only partially overlapped. Beauty, at least on the cover of an atlas, and attention do not march in lockstep.

To reach this conclusion, the team constructed a rigorously controlled experimental framework. They generated eight atlas-cover stimuli according to a 2×2×2 within-subject factorial design, systematically varying color harmony (contrast versus analogous schemes), graphic style (concrete landscape imagery versus abstract map symbols), and layout configuration (centralized versus decentralized arrangements). Forty valid participants each viewed the full set of covers across two counterbalanced viewing cycles, producing sixteen trials per participant. The two repeated observations for each participant–cover combination were averaged before analysis, a precaution that reduced the influence of moment-to-moment fluctuations in attention and mood.

The subjective side of the experiment yielded clear and statistically robust results. Participants rated covers featuring contrast harmony—palettes built on deliberate chromatic opposition—as significantly more attractive than their analogous counterparts. Concrete landscape imagery proved even more powerful: covers depicting recognizable scenery outperformed those built from map symbols with a mean difference of 0.66 on the rating scale, a difference that survived Holm correction for multiple comparisons with a p-value of 0.003. Color harmony contributed a smaller but highly reliable boost (mean difference 0.29, p less than 0.001), and centralized layouts added a further modest advantage (mean difference 0.14, p equal to 0.031). In short, what people said they liked most was a cover that showed them a beautiful, recognizable place in a striking color scheme, arranged with a clear visual center.

The eye-tracking data told a different and partially independent story. When the researchers examined total fixation duration and fixation count—the two most widely used indicators of sustained visual attention—they found that layout configuration was the dominant factor. Centralized layouts held viewers’ eyes longer, adding an average of 0.34 seconds of total fixation duration and 1.13 additional fixations compared with decentralized arrangements, both differences highly significant after correction. This makes intuitive sense once one pictures the stimuli: a cover with a strong central focal point gives the eye an obvious anchor, encouraging repeated returns and longer dwell times, whereas a decentralized composition scatters attention across competing regions and invites quicker exits.

Graphic style, by contrast, exerted its influence mainly at the very beginning of viewing, shaping initial attentional orienting rather than sustained engagement. Landscape imagery captured the eye early, presumably because recognizable scenes trigger rapid semantic processing and emotional resonance, but this early advantage did not necessarily translate into longer overall inspection. Color harmony showed only small effects on visual exploration in either direction, suggesting that while palette strongly colors our aesthetic verdict, it does relatively little to choreograph the movement of our eyes across the page.

The most provocative finding emerged when the researchers formally tested whether perceived attractiveness and gaze behavior were associated at all. Using linear mixed-effects association models—the same statistical machinery that handled the factorial comparisons—they found no robust relationship between subjective attractiveness ratings and any of the four gaze-based indicators once Holm–Bonferroni correction was applied, with all corrected p-values at or above 0.110. In other words, a cover that people loved was not reliably a cover they stared at, and a cover that held their gaze was not reliably a cover they admired.

This partial dissociation between aesthetic evaluation and visual attention carries real theoretical weight. It suggests that the two responses are governed by partly separable mechanisms: gaze behavior reflects the allocation of attentional resources, driven by salience, layout structure, and the search for information, while aesthetic preference reflects an affective judgment integrating color emotion, semantic content, and compositional harmony. The authors frame this as a dual-layer logic of cover design, in which layout serves as the scaffolding that organizes visual processing, while color harmony and graphic style operate on a second layer, enhancing emotional appeal and thematic expressiveness without necessarily prolonging looking.

For designers and publishers, the practical implications are tangible. If the goal is to make a cover feel beautiful, the evidence points squarely toward concrete landscape imagery, supported by a contrast-harmonious palette and a reasonably centralized composition. If the goal is to maximize the time a browser spends visually engaged with the cover—for instance, on a crowded bookshop shelf or a dense online catalog—then layout configuration becomes the primary lever, with a strong central focal point doing the heavy lifting. The two goals can be pursued simultaneously, but they should not be conflated, because a design that wins one contest does not automatically win the other.

The study also demonstrates the value of bringing experimental rigor to a domain that has rarely received it. Eye-tracking research has long illuminated how people read maps, scan packaging, and navigate digital interfaces, but atlas covers—a hybrid genre blending cartographic symbolism with book-cover aesthetics—had been largely left to heuristic experience. By combining a factorial stimulus design with mixed-effects modeling and rigorous correction for multiple comparisons, this work offers a template for evidence-based design research in adjacent fields, from textbook covers to data-visualization dashboards. It also issues a caution to the growing industry of attention metrics: what the eye does and what the mind prefers are related but distinct phenomena, and measuring only one risks misunderstanding the other. For the humble atlas cover, the path to a reader’s heart apparently runs through the landscape painting and the color wheel, while the path to a reader’s eyes runs through the geometry of the layout—and the two paths, though they share a starting point, lead to different destinations.

Subject of Research: Eye-tracking investigation of how color harmony, graphic style, and layout shape aesthetic preference and visual attention in atlas-cover design

Article Title: Aesthetic preference and gaze-based visual attention in atlas-cover design: Evidence from an eye-tracking study

Article References: Hu, P., Fang, H., Gui, Y., Yang, N., Yu, G., & Huang, Z. (2026). Aesthetic preference and gaze-based visual attention in atlas-cover design: Evidence from an eye-tracking study. PLOS One, 21(10), e0359864. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359864

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0359864

Keywords: eye-tracking, atlas cover design, aesthetic preference, visual attention, color harmony, layout configuration, graphic style, fixation duration, cartography, PLOS One, mixed-effects models, design research

The site could hardly be more charged. It sits at the confluence of the Kurbağalıdere stream and the Bosphorus strait, where centuries of urban encroachment have progressively channeled and enclosed a once-significant natural waterway. Kadıköy, one of Istanbul’s oldest continuously inhabited districts—ancient Chalcedon on the Anatolian shore—faces the classic pressures of rapid densification: shrinking permeable green surface, congested thoroughfares, retreating public space, and civic administrative functions scattered across multiple buildings. The proposal reinterprets these pressures not as constraints but as catalysts for urban regeneration, aligning with a global shift from property-led redevelopment toward regenerative, community-centered approaches.

The study’s most striking element is the Yeşil Yapı Kabuğu, or Green Building Shell: a vegetated roofscape of approximately 21,650 square meters that folds the planned green corridor of the Kurbağalıdere across the building’s entire programmatic mass. Functionally, the shell operates as both envelope and public terrain, providing rainwater management, thermal insulation, and biodiversity support—benefits well documented in the green-roof literature, from stormwater attenuation to urban heat island mitigation. Crucially, the entire site remains open to public use without institutional authorization or security screening, returning to citizens a public footprint equal to the building’s structural mass. It is a form of architectural compensation: a park placed on top of city hall.

The roofscape is not an arbitrary gesture but a morphology shaped by an integrated reading of site conditions—Bosphorus viewsheds, the stream corridor’s geometry, topographic gradients, adjacent rooflines, and a planned metro station at the site’s southern edge. The shell resolves into three interlocking figures. The Yamaç, or Slope, continues the green roof over the future metro station, ascending gently toward the water and mediating between ground-level ecology and elevated terrain. The Kent Terası, or Urban Terrace, hovers above the Presidential section as a contemplative civic balcony, echoing democratic precedents such as the Reichstag dome, where the public is placed in direct visual relation to the spaces of governance. The Şehir Manzaralı Tepe, or City-View Hill, rises above the surrounding rooflines as a navigational landmark and symbolic summit framing the Istanbul skyline.

Connectivity is the third structural principle of the study’s tripartite analytical framework—conceptual emergence, morphological structure, and urban connectivity—which the author, architect Günay Erdem, applies to interpret the competition entry. The building extends the Kıyı Gezinti Promenadı, the coastal promenade, by roughly 650 meters directly across its accessible roof, drawing pedestrian movement from the Bosphorus shoreline along the Kurbağalıdere banks and culminating on the roofscape itself. This dissolves the conventional boundary between architecture and public infrastructure: the building becomes simultaneously a passage, a platform, and a destination, anchoring itself within the district’s pedestrian and ecological networks.

Inside, the proposal departs equally sharply from municipal convention. The organizing device is the Belediye Hizmetleri Sokağı, the Municipal Services Street—a multi-level, light-filled interior axis around which all public-facing functions are arranged. Amphitheater seating, planted pockets, and gallery voids connect to mezzanine levels housing municipal directorates in open-plan, glazed offices. The spatial logic draws on the philosophy of Jan Gehl’s ‘life between buildings’ and on precedents such as Norman Foster’s Reichstag dome, where architecture is deliberately deployed to render governance legible. Transparency here is not merely symbolic: the physical layout allows citizens to see and navigate the structure of municipal services, reducing the distance between government and governed, while the open-plan mezzanines are designed for reconfiguration as administrative models evolve.

Two programmatic innovations push the building toward what the study terms a civic ecosystem. The Municipal Services Development Center reconfigures the traditional library into a hybrid civic laboratory, pairing the library with the Kent Konseyi—city council—so that citizens, particularly young people, can observe, critique, and co-develop municipal services through co-design workshops, real-time service performance dashboards, and structured dialogue with planning departments. The Municipal Services Exhibition Square adds a public venue for festivals, exhibitions, and civic celebrations, where departments can display initiatives and cultivate institutional accountability. The study is candid about the limits of spatial design: openness does not automatically generate engagement, and institutions may resist the cultural shift from service delivery toward co-governance unless participation is backed by frameworks giving citizen input substantive consequence.

The mobility strategy reinforces the ecological and civic logic. Two main pedestrian access points—a northern entrance beneath the shell’s highest point linking to a tramway station, and a southern entrance carved between the Slope and the Presidential wing serving metro, Metrobüs, and commuter rail—channel multimodal flows through the building. Vehicular access is confined to a single southwestern point, with four basement parking levels conceived as a transitional, residual provision while the project’s aspirational modal split prioritizes walking, cycling, and transit. This transit-oriented approach protects surface continuity, reduces heat island effects, and positions the civic institution as a node in the district’s mobility network rather than a traffic generator.

Placed against six international precedents—the High Line, Cheonggyecheon, the Oodi Central Library, Seoul Innovation Park among them—the Kadıköy proposal’s contribution becomes clear. Linear green infrastructure and stream restorations have transformed cities, and civic buildings like Oodi have transcended administrative function, but no precedent in the comparative set fuses vegetated envelope, ecological corridor restoration, and spatialized governance transparency within a single operating municipal institution. The study also distinguishes its methodological position: rather than algorithmic, simulation-driven optimization, the form emerges from a qualitatively informed, context-responsive synthesis of site data, open to future quantitative validation through energy, microclimate, stormwater, and pedestrian-flow modeling.

The implications extend well beyond Istanbul. The core strategies—accessible green roofscape as public terrain, a transparent internal civic street, and participatory governance infrastructure embedded in an institutional building—respond to conditions shared across densifying metropolitan districts in Türkiye, the Middle East, Southern Europe, and Asia: green space deficits, institutions retreating from public life, growing multimodal mobility demand, and the need for long-term institutional adaptability. As a testbed for what the study calls eco-civic urbanism, the unbuilt Kadıköy proposal suggests that the 21st-century city hall may be less a container of administration than an active facilitator of regenerative, inclusive, and participatory urban life—with the evidence base for that ambition awaiting the empirical tests of construction, post-occupancy evaluation, and comparative study that the research identifies as its next frontier.

Subject of Research: Eco-civic architectural design for urban regeneration and participatory municipal governance in Istanbul's Kadıköy district

Article Title: An integrated architectural approach to urban regeneration and public service enhancement at the Kadıköy municipality building

Article References: An integrated architectural approach to urban regeneration and public service enhancement at the Kadıköy municipality building. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00372-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00372-3

Keywords: Kadıköy, Istanbul, green infrastructure, urban regeneration, biophilic urbanism, civic architecture, participatory governance, green roof, morphology, transit-oriented development, municipal building, design research