Visual Communication

by Ivana Velkovska

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." - John Berger
"Words divide, pictures unite" - Otto Neurath

From the moment we wake up in the morning, until the moment we go to sleep, we are influenced ad infinitum by images. During a walk on a street, or while staying at home, our surrounding consists of all sort of images : starting from the wall space in our room, TV, video, film, photography, digital graphics, advertisements, newspaper, printings, paintings...even t-shirts, tattoos or packaging.

We are (more or less) aware of the aggressive presence of visuals and new messages born each day, eagerly wanting our attention. These messages mark us, in a positive or a negative way, and change us or stay in our conscience, even a little bit. Some experts even warn that this mediatised bombarding with images, make people see more visuals, but read less words, which can lead to illiteracy and lawlessness. The short definition of visual communication would be: transferring a message or an information not only by using text, but also visuals. The basics of visual communication is that the sender has something to say to the receiver: a message.
The message "travels" throughout a channel or a medium: poster, TV, Internet, newspaper...

The success of the receiving the message will depend on the budget and on what the sender knows about the receiver. In other words, there are no aesthetics criterion, no artistic preferences, nor some agreed-upon standards of how a good or bad (visual) communication should look like.

The terms of beautiful or ugly are excluded and considered to be irrelevant. For this communication to be carried out, the task of graphic designers is to construct the message by using :
1. Typography (designed letters, carefully chosen for the purpose of the message)
2. Graphics (creation of the image : photography, illustration, digital art or visual which is a mixture of plenty of techniques)
3. and Design, which is arranging the text and the image in order to be more attractive and remarkable) That would be a short definition of the visual communication process.

Paul Martin Lester in his book "Visual Communication: Images with messages" (2005), employs the idea of why some messages are easily remembered by individuals or cultures while other messages are easily forgotten? He also recalls of the fact that the most meaningful, powerful and culturally important messages are those where text and image are combined equally and respectfully. "The first step towards understanding visual communication is to educate yourself about the many ways that information is produced and consumed in a modern, media-rich society. Typographic, graphic, informational, cartoon, still, moving, television, computer, and World Wide Web images are analyzed within a framework of personal, historical, technical, ethical, cultural and critical perspectives in order to complete this first step." (Paul Martin Lester, Visual Communication : Images with messages")

However, as the technology advances, the presence of visual communication gets more and more visible, and the influence stronger, but, everyone has a choice of what to watch, read, consume and finally see.

References
- Lester, Paul Martin, 2005, Visual Communication : Images with messages http://books.google.com/books?id=6oibH9roTmkC
- Bergström, Bo, Essentials of Visual Communication, 2008, Laurence King Publishing, London