16/9/09

What is visual communication?


What is Visual Communication?

The Italian artist Bruno Munari states that visual communication is itself the act that occurs with visual messages and where the human eye is the essential tool in the process. Each of the senses has only a relative percentage of effectiveness: the taste, smell, touch and hearing, together, get 20% of information, while the sight captures the remaining 80%. He also affirms the existence of a source emitting such messages and a subject who receives it. However, there is a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes the original and communicative process: the specification of the visual message and the existence of specific filters in each receiver.

How it works

It may divide the visual message in two parts:

1. Information: or different types of data that might be contained in the message.

2. Support: either the set of elements that is visible to the naked eye the message that is through color, texture, form, perspective. The information takes shape and materializes.

So that a human being who will communicate visually will first need to have information on the head, this information can be simple or complex messages. Once the subject or issuer information has processed and abstracted it, and then it makes the idea into real, through visual resources and the leveling of these elements in a defined space.

To perform this equalization the personality of the sender (its context and cognitive filters, historical, social, personal, cultural, spiritual and physical) and of the recipient must be taken into account, since the first is the one who will print his personality to the message and the latter one will be responsible for decoding this information previously organized in order to understand the idea that is supposed to be inside.

What is it used?

As mentioned previously in this article, the human being receives the largest percentage of information through the sense of sight, which means that any message received through the eyes, have increased uptake in the brain that other messages that could be captured through hearing, smell or touch, turning the latter into mere companions of visual information.

This does not mean that important information is received by the other senses studied and scientifically accepted. In fact, the data captured through these other parts of the body can establish relationships and define the meaning of the information that is recorded by the view.

Returning to the fact that the eye captures 80% of the information, we find sense to the semiotic theories of signs that maintains that the most important meanings can be lectured through visual symbols or signs. So that to make a message is grasped more easily and quickly by using graphic symbols, such as colors or shapes previously equipped with conventional meanings.

This is one reason why advertising is the most hackneyed plot when creating advertising strategies, because the message will go directly and quickly to the chosen target audience.

Pics

Vision

Eye

Recommendations:

BRUNO MUNARI, Design and Visual Communication: Contribution to a teaching method, Ed Gustavo Gili.

GUILLERMO DE LA TORRE AND RIZO, The Language of Symbols Graphics: Introduction to Visual Communication, Limusa.

JACQUES AUMONT, Image, Paidós.

PETER BONNICCI, Visual Language: The hidden face of the communication, Index Books.