Discussions, doodles, diatribes

Being surrounded by not only academically-focused visual communicators but also leaders in the newspaper design and multimedia presentation fields, I am constantly surprised at the dismissal of the importance of visual communications in other journalism fields. I interact with those from every sequence within our major (news-editorial, magazine, advertising, public relations, secondary education and photo journalism) in my required introductory course to visual communications.

Being visually literate is a skill that everyone, regardless of field, really should possess, but particularly those in a field focused on communicating in different ways and telling stories to different audiences. Public relations folks are journalists whether they like it or not. The field is all about telling stories, regardless of media, through stories themselves, photographs, advertising, PR campaigns, etc. However, I think all too often, especially in our curriculum, students are taught in the upper level graphics courses to visually communicate as graphics reporters – both through print and multimedia techniques. The skills are highly transferable to other fields, but do those in the other fields understand that.

I am currently faced with the daunting task of job searching for the ump-teenth time in my life and fail to understand how many different definitions people in the industry have for journalism, public relations, graphics and the like. What is even more difficult to fathom is that often “mass communication degree” is seen as more understandable to some than the more discipline-specific titles.

Sorry, I digress, back to visual communications…

Two of the major ideas discussed in visual literacy is the ability to make things readable and legible — regardless of their purpose. Although this is discussed and related mostly to typography, I fear some in the industry fail to ask these two simple questions when evaluating any visual material: “Is it legible?” and “Is it readable?”. I don’t even want to get into the question of whether something is aesthetically pleasing for fear the “design is subjective” gods will rain down.

Legibility and readability both relate to ease of use. Can someone look at something in a matter of a few seconds and know the basic premise of what it is? For Web sites, can it load in a few seconds and does the user know where to go within those couple seconds? Even though these concepts are questioned in newsrooms across the country by page designers and Web site designers, other disciplines sometimes forget that we are all serving the same public — ourselves. I often tell my students that it does them no good to pat each other on the back during a critique when, in the critiquer’s mind, that person knows it is not as good as it could be. Then I get it to grade and the student wonders why the score is lower than expected.

I’m sure I’ll continue this discussion, possibly with great examples, but for now I just wish people would look at their visual messages and question the readability and legibility and say “Is it easy to use and understand?”.