**6. Conclusions**

Until now, research regarding signboards in the commercial streetscape has been conducted based on a questionnaire on people's perceptions. However, surveys have the limit of not knowing which ones the participants looked at and evaluated. This study is meaningful in that it focuses on the foreground elements of the landscape and analyzes people's viewing patterns in terms of the theory of the Gestalt to solve this problem. The result confirms that the focus of attention on signboards arouses people's interest, which makes them perceive a dynamic streetscape image. This represents the effect of a signboard as a foreground element, and also confirms the importance of the foreground element when people perceive streetscape.

This study can sugges<sup>t</sup> the following implications. When designing guidelines for outdoor signboards in streetscapes, consideration of Signboards area and design should proceed. Signboards are an important element in the commercial street landscape. The District unit plan guideline [34] states the signboards should follow "outdoor advertisement guidelines" once the necessary changes have been made to prevent excessive exposure to the outside or a sense of disparity with the building or surrounding buildings. The results of this study show that signboards can induce people's gaze and let people feel the image of the active commercial street landscape, but disorganized signboards have a negative aesthetic effect. Therefore, when establishing guidelines for outdoor signboards, considering a plan to harmonize the shape and size of signboards to maintain unity, will benefit the commerciality of signboards which transfers information to people. The research results sugges<sup>t</sup> the importance of signboards in future commercial streetscapes and show that improved visual communication between pedestrians and streetscapes can create attractive streetscapes.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, B.K. and J.P.; Data curation, B.K.; Formal analysis, B.K.; Investigation, B.K.; Methodology, B.K.; Project administration, J.P.; Supervision, J.P.; Validation, J.P.; Writing—original draft, B.K.; Writing—review & editing, J.P. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A5A2A01026252).

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Hanyang University (protocol code: HYU-2019-10-001-2, date of approval: Dec 02, 2019).

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Acknowledgments:** This thesis was written using the data from Kim, Byungsuk's doctoral thesis.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
