• Course: Visual communication 101 Lecture 1• Instructor: Rabia Nadir • Lahore School of Economics

Communication as essential consequential and ubiquitous human activity

From Latin ‘communicare’ to make common, to share.

‘A process of using messages to generate meaning’

Source, receiver, ( Human ) The nature of the receiver and the source are of immense importance in visual communication. Human beings visual perception operates according to certain given perceptual tendencies. Understanding of visual perception helps to discover the manner in which a visual stimulus will impact the viewer.

Message, channel ( Media ), the media of visual communication can influence the nature of the message. Think of the virtual medium versus the print medium.

Articulation and Interpretation

Communication is not a thing but an event with some specific process. It is not the utterance or the strip of film that comprises the communication event, but rather the fact that the sound or the strip of film is treated in a special way. It is the way we treat the signs that makes an event communicative, rather than the signs themselves…..Sol Worth (filmmaker and theorist).

Describe: From Latin describo (write around).

Define: From Latin definio (put limits).

Inform: from Latin informo (put into shape, shape up).

These icons developed by a web designer are illustrative of the visual nature of many words associated with some act of knowing, vision is a way of knowing and understanding

"Paintings as ancestral designs do not simply represent the ancestral beings by encoding stories... As far as the Yolngo are concerned, the designs are an integral part of the ancestral beings themselves... The designs themselves possess or contain the power of the ancestral being."

Power of the Visual

• Visual communication is when pictures, graphics, and other images are used to express ideas and to teach people.

• They range from the simplified and reduced language of signs including alphabets, pictograms etc to the confection of images and words of printed and digital media and the one to one correspondence of the ‘real’ of the filmic image.

• For visual communication to be effective, the receiver must be able to construct meaning from seeing the visual image.

• The study of visual perception offers considerable evidence that the world or the image is not ‘given’ as sometimes people say, but constructed. In visual perception we are not like passive cameras, the mind engages in active interpretation of the world. A good way to understand this is to simply compare the visual abilities of different species of animals on the planet. The visual . ability differs in acuity, the focal distances, it is highest in birds but insects are very short –sighted. The position of eyes also varies with animals as does the ability to distinguish colors. Reality ( visual) is different for all these creatures.

Icon — An Icon sign is a sign that resembles something, such as photographs of people. An icon can also be illustrative or diagrammatic, for example a ‘no-smoking’ sign.

Index — An Index signs is a sign where there is a direct link between the sign and the object. The majority of traffic signs are Index signs as they represent information which relates to a location (eg, a ‘slippery road surface’ sign placed on a road which is prone to flooding)

Symbols —  A symbol has no logical meaning between it and the object.

Charles Sanders Peirce an American philosopher proposed that signs can be divided into the above three types

Power of the Visual

• Course: Visual communication 101 Lecture 1• Instructor: Rabia Nadir • Lahore School of Economics

‘We thrive in information thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacity to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flit through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff and separate the sheep from the goats.’ Edward Tufte

The human body is the earliest medium of visual communication

Japanese Noh Dancer

A Tribal Dancer

Hall of Bulls at Lascaux France

Tibetan Thanka

17th century engraving to assist in memorising the ‘Digest’ of 50 books of law. Allegory, bizarre associations and punning are used to aid memory.

Edward Tufte has used the following two as examples of the sophisticated and elegant versus the impoverished and ugly visual confection. Note the visual rhetorical devices in both pictures

El Lissitzky Self Portrait, The Constructor Book Jacket, Graphic Design, USA 12