The Visual Communication Perspective

Visual Communication is a design discipline focused upon communication through the manipulation of the relationship between text | image. Within this discipline the two main design outcomes are graphic design and illustration. The discipline’s name places the emphasis upon the method (design), the objective (communication) and the medium (visual), rather than just the creation of graphic forms (outcomes). (Frascara, 2004, p4). Graphic design certainly is a commercial activity with a connection to marketing and advertising, but it performs beyond mere subservience to business models. It shapes much of the visual culture of the modern world (Crowley, 2004), but as a discipline Visual Communication is misunderstood by other disciplines. Other disciplines interchangeably use any of the following terms when referring to Visual Communication: Visual Design, Communication Design, Interface Design, Web Design, and Graphic Design (see Table 1).

Although designers traditionally have focused upon practice, there is a theoretical basis to their work that maximises the transmission of the central message within their design solutions. The sender of the message operates from a perspective of intention; the messenger (the designer) operates from a perspective of proximity; and the receiver reacts interpretively from a perspective of reception using their feelings and perception (Bergström, 2008, pp32-33). The materials to achieve this go beyond the printed page, and include typography, colour, form, texture, line, weight, composition to create discourse and emotional engagement with the communication. The shaping and selecting of the most apt visual combination of elements is important in order to transmit an intended message. The semiotic process of the visual signifier leading to a signified communication to an audience is usually within a specific socio-cultural context, and is intended to rhetorically elicit some form of behavioural change in the audience. The designer’s skill and ability to do this effectively is more complex than it first appears, and less self-serving and subjective the more it is understood. It is true, to a degree, that to some designers their work is implicit and creatively intuitive and devoid of theoretical rules; but the discipline is deeper than this.

Barnard uses the phrase “communication is a cultural phenomenon, not an engineering problem” (2005, p28) with which he means that this construction can only be investigated semiotically and through qualitative methods. Jorge Frascara (2004) attempts to reposition the understanding of Visual Communication as a proactive facilitator of behavioural change. The core of their arguments rests in the relationship between text | image to incite a change of behaviour in the viewer, using the rhetorical and semiotic structure underlying this relationship. Frascara says, “It would be a fundamental error to believe that in design one can deal with the form independent of content, or with sensorial, independent of the cognitive and the emotional.” (2004, p65). Barnard folds into this the semiological roots of Visual Communication, “Signs and codes are the bases of meanings in semiology. And signs and codes are explained in terms of learned and variable cultural rules.” (2005, p28). Through this framework for identifying behaviour, experience is evoked by tangible and experiential engagement with an artefact or in a situation, whether physical or digital. Interaction designer Jon Kolko sees this contextual framework as a methodology to connect ‘people, technology, and the emotional qualities of sensory data’ (p41) together to discover the effectiveness, scalability, usability and engagement of the solution. His use of the term ‘sensory data’ suggests that that data is mediated in some way. If data is to be classed as sensory with emotional qualities, then an aesthetic is emerging. This is phenomenological and Visual Communication has historical precedence in balancing the ‘tension between structure and freedom’ (Helfand, 2001, p61).

Some of the early Modernist progenitors that influenced the discipline’s development, Rodchenko, Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy, moved ‘freely across the boundaries’ (MacDonald, 2004a) that defined its development into a less commercial and more experimental, rhetorical direction. From the manifestos of Contructivism, Futurism, de Stilj through to the minimalism of Bauhaus (Lupton & Miller, 2009, p62) and the International Style; the semiotic experimentation of visual language has led to the position where the viewer is equally involved in the processing of the visually communicated message. Typographer Jan Tschichold strove for a clear and ambiguous form of emotional clarity in communication. In his essay on New Typography he for urges that “a fresh and original intellectual approach is needed, avoiding all standard solutions” to achieve communication. Visual Communication’s visual language has developed “a ‘grammar’ of contrasts (instability/balance, asymmetry/symmetry, soft/hard, heavy/light)” (Lupton and Miller, 1999, p64). Within this tension comes a benefit of ‘structured clarity’ with a capacity of inventive expression, a liberation of a ‘subjective point of view as an enhanced expression of fact - not at the expense of it’ (Helfand, 2001, p62).
If communication, meaning, interpretation and construction can only be understood through qualitative means then, I argue that a methodology of understanding this through adaptation of research methods taken from phenomenology would help reposition Visual Communication as an influence upon Interaction Design. From the literature on Visual Communication the word phenomena is widely used to describe the discipline’s internal and external characteristics. Heller (2001) refers to ‘design phenomena’; Margolin (1996), Williams (2007), Huck (1997) and Barry (1997) all use the term ‘phenomena’ in different philosophical and sociological contexts when explaining aspects of Visual Communication; and Margolin, Hill (2004), and Smith (2005) take their theses deeper into phenomenology. But all stop short from using phenomenological methodologies to explore their individual perspectives. Kenney (2009) in his book on Visual Communication Research Designs, he features examples of Ethnography, Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis as qualitative research methodologies. But nothing on phenomenological methodologies despite the literature using the term ‘phenomena’ quite freely.

Visual Communication and Performance

Jorge Frascara in his excellent book Communication Design argues for a fresh look on the function of Graphic Design. By looking at graphic designs, like illustration, as outcomes of Visual Communication, it makes it easier to escape the accusation that Graphic Design is just artifice.

Graphic designers, notes HCI expert Bruce Tognazzini, are limited to the interface’s ‘surface’ - how it looks and the design strategy behind communicating the content structure (2003). Gillian Crampton Smith, former school director of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, sees graphic designers’ role as more involved in the interactive design process “designing what a package is and what it does, and then designing what it will be like” (Aymer, 2001). Crampton Smith, a former graphic designer within software development is well placed to acknowledge the role graphic designers can and do play in interface design. The visual language of interaction design is built upon design axioms inherited from graphic design, learnt over decades of designing for print.

Unfortunately there are misconceptions held by many professionals outside the discipline as to what a graphic designer does. They have been perceived as “decorationists, elitists or servants of the consumerist machine” (Laurel, 2003) and their work as “frivolous or shallow” (O'Reilly, 2004). Over the last century graphic design is so “deeply ingrained in the texture of daily life that it is taken for granted” (Crowley, (2004). It has become pervasive and transparent. Yet graphic design is actually serving its purpose - visually communicating a message or visually structuring the functions of an interface. In the next section I will be examining this issue.

Interaction design expert Brenda Laurel reflects that labels such as ‘dictators of style’, decorationists, elitists, ‘servants of the consumerist machine’ were unfair misconceptions of graphic designers’ profession, marginalizing their contributions despite the pervasiveness of them within society. Most of its practice is subjective, instinctive and implicit, alternating between the “consideration of objective information and intuitive leaps” (Frascara, 2006). Graphic design, when designed well, can “inspire a behavourial change” in its audiences (Forlizzi & Lebbon, 2006).

In Communication Design, Frascara develops this argument, strengthening the case for Visual Communication to be understood properly and not prejudicially. “Although some designs can become ornaments, historical documents or aesthetic paradigms – once they’ve accomplished their primary goal – visual communication design is not just about looks; it is fundamentally about performance.” (p12) He argues that a designer is designing an "an event, an act in which the public interacts with the design." This is an objective that makes it the "design of communicational situations" that impacts on "the knowledge, the attitudes, and the behaviour of people" (p13) and this happens after the communication has happened. The communicational event that is the design happens over time. The visual and aesthetic strength of the design are dimensions in which the communication is contained. This is how Visual Communication can now be seen, repositioned if you like, beyond the perceived 'aesthetics of surface' and into the 'aesthetics of use'.

Barnard in his book Graphic Design as Communication (2005) also comes to a similar conclusion that Visual Communication is about the performance of the communication. He writes, "the pleasure of the image, its entertainment value, is experienced at the same time as its persuasive function. Indeed, some would argue that the pleasure engendered is an integral part of its rhetorical power. Nor is it the case that an example of graphic design will perform only one of these functions. There can be no piece of graphic design that is only decorative, or only informative. It is the case that any and all examples of graphic design will perform more than one of these functions.” (pp16-17) The rhetorical nature of the work, its semiological transmission of a message is all there to shape the design's performance, and a primary conclusion of a behavioural change in the person receiving the design.

Sidenote: As Frascara discusses Visual Communication in the book I feel that the term used for the title causes confusion. Yes Graphic Design is about communication through the visual relationships of image/text, but the term Communication Design is a term that weakens this relationship.

References used:

AYMER, G. (2001) Norman Cooking. Create Online. 8. p38-40. BALDWIN, J. and ROBERTS, L. (2006). Visual Communication. London: AVA Publishing Ltd.

BARNARD, M. (2005) Graphic Design as Communication. Abingdon: Routledge.

FORLIZZI, J. and LEBBON, C. (2006). From Formalism to Social Significance in Communication Design. In: A. Bennett, (Ed.), Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design - A Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 51-63.

FRASCARA, J. (2004) Communication Design: Principles, Methods and Practice. New York: Allworth Press.

FRASCARA, J. (2006). Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science. In: A. Bennett, (Ed.), Design Studies: Theory and Research in Graphic Design - A Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 26-35.

LAUREL, B. Ed (2003). Design Research: Methods and Perspectives. London: MIT Press.

O’REILLY, J. (2004) Thinking with Images. In: R. POYNOR, ed. Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties. London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., pp216-231.

TOGNAZZINI, B. (2003) It's Time We Got Respect [online]. [Accessed 2nd January 2009]. Available from: http://www.asktog.com/columns/057ItsTimeWeGotRespect.html)