Posts within this category will build a perspective on visual communication design theory, based on ideas from various disciplines, such as psychology, semiotics, communications, and data visualization, that contribute to the understanding and analysis of visual communication design.
It isn’t much of a coincidence, that I want to begin discussing visual design “space” by talking about real space, as for years, I have started every workday looking at a computer screen with a background image of a galaxy surrounded by stars – a visualization of intergalactic space. Although Canada’s capital city isn’t a […]Continue reading
Ask yourself, how would you understand the concept of dark without light, up without down, or good without bad? Could you? Ferdinand de Saussure is one of the early developers of the discipline we call semiotics – the study of how our minds establish meaning. Halfway through Saussure’s seminal book Course in General Linguistics, he abruptly states, “everything that […]Continue reading
When I began designing, my colleagues and I thought the purpose of graphic design was to make things look intriguing. Working with typographic and graphic elements, we created interesting compositions with aesthetic integrity. We wanted our clients and bosses to be happy, but we felt the design was our design, and our ultimate goal was […]Continue reading
In visual communication design, there are 2 forms of visual disruptions that compromise a message. We’ll call these disruptions, visual noise. The first kind is the noise in the channel that delivers the visual message, and the second is the noise in the visual code (message) being delivered through that channel. We are going to […]Continue reading
You may be amazed to know when some of the most important concepts to inform visual communication were discovered. Our discipline just wasn’t mature enough to be sitting at the same table with some of these brilliant thinkers. And some of these concepts have been virtually lost – lost in our current infatuation with the […]Continue reading
Before jumping into this post I will give a quick overview of the last two posts on theory as they will offer context for this discussion. 1) The human mind processes information at low to high levels of consciousness. Some messages, like this sentence, need intense thinking to decode their meaning, while other messages, like […]Continue reading
I would like to discuss an important theory born out of cognitive science that, by chance, offers surprisingly good news for visual communication design. This theory is called, dual-coding theory. Picture that you are driving down the highway, traffic is heavy, and you are maneuvering around large trucks as you pass through slower traffic. As […]Continue reading
In post 1, we discussed how visual information is sent to a message receiver (a), not from the information source (c), but by the message designer who intervenes, assembling the visual message (b) on the information source’s behalf (see figure 1). We could also say this in another way – that the visual communication designer encodes […]Continue reading
About 10 years ago, while producing a major annual report, I became fixated on an idea. My client funded social science research, and needed to communicate some heady ideas – ideas about research and discovery – ideas concerning the value of uncovering answers, or even revealing the questions, that would help shape society’s future. My personal […]Continue reading
