Visual Communicators – An Asset to Any Business.

If you’re a visual communicator you have the qualities universities boast of and employers want; research, critical analysis, imagination, problem solving, independent thinking, people skills, meeting deadlines, communication, comprehension and listening.  And by taking words and numbers even further with visual literacy – more creativity. Perfectly suited to manage this moving image, visually rich, multi media, information heavy, networked world.

Visual Communications – The Process.

The process. You get a client. They want to achieve something using your skills which might be in any one or more media from illustration to printmaking, film, photography, graphics, or animation, particular to you. Its got to be developed, approved, made and delivered, maybe with the help of others, to a strict deadline and at a given cost. As you can imagine, there’s potential for all sorts of disputes along the way.

Agreeing a Brief.

This is the first part. Agreeing a brief with the client to work out what you have to deliver, what the intended objectives are and who the target audience is, to be completed at a certain time, and at what cost paid when.

Developing a brief helps you and the client both understand what is being sought to be delivered. Which makes it the beginning of the creative process.

It is also a written document mutually understood and agreed that will act as a compass to keep the project on track and can be referred to in case of disagreements. It’s invaluable in keeping the peace. It’s a written contract.

Understanding and Communicating.

Understanding and Communicating is a core skill. It is essential. You need this to be certain that your client, any other professionals involved and yourself share the same understanding of the brief and what it intends: the scope of the budget, who the target audience is, what has to be achieved, what is to be delivered, and how, and where, and when. Never assume it’s mutually understood. Always double check.

Research and Enquiry.

Research and enquiry is food for being creative. If you neglect or avoid it – your level of creativity will be weak. There are two types: primary research – where you dig down to fundamental original sources; and secondary research – where you examine what other creatives have made previously. Both are of value but the first is likely to lead to originality whereas relying only on the second will create second or third hand results .

Problem Solving.

Problem solving generates ideas. The objectives and restraints in your brief define what and how you research, and in turn these objectives and restraints are informed and evolve according to your ongoing experiences and discoveries. Through that process  ideas are found developed and tested (is it better or worse is the repeated question as the process is repeated round and round) until the options are narrowed and a solution is selected.

I strongly recommended you keep an ideas book where you record this process as it goes along. Not scribbling down thoughts and ideas at the time they occur guarantees they’ll be forgotten. And then you’ll forget that you have forgotten. Artists, writers and designers keep their ideas books and often look through them discovering ideas anew they’d overlooked or that have gained new meaning over time.

Imagination and Ideas.

Imagination is what generates good ideas and makes you creative. Coming up with imaginative ideas is not an arty farty magical thing. There really are methods and procedures that help: mind mapping, doodling, daydreaming, sleeping on it, walking, meditating, dreaming, the six hats, lateral thinking, reverse brainstorming, zero draft – more. Find the ones that suit you and fill your ideas book. Self importance and ongoing self criticism are your enemy when doing this.

The methods and processes above let you harness the power of  your subconscious by side-lining your safety-first conscious egotistical critic, judge, and censor during the problem solving phase so that you can cough up from the depths as many unfiltered ideas as you can. Don’t judge, let the good, bad, dangerous, weird and indifferent out. What seems bad now can often fuse with another thing when perusing your ideas later and transform into something great. If you’ve fed your imagination with thorough research you’ll get good ideas.

Tools of the Trade.

Your creativity is not just in your head but it also involves your body and your body’s situation in the environment and the tools and materials it interacts with. When you explore with pencils, software, electronics, cameras, type, paint, inks, paper, stone, clay or whatever and evaluate iteratively as you go (good or bad, better or worse) towards a finished product the ‘doing’ feeds back and influences and re-defines your ideas.

The better your ability with those tools get, the better the evaluative choices you get to make, which in turn leads to a more refined idea and a superior finished product. Working in the physical develops and puts your ideas to the test like iron in a foundry.

Through Visual Communications you can produce materials for broadcast publishing – Internet, film, animation and television; and product publishing – print, packaging, artefacts and signs. Your skills can be used in selling products and ideas; improving culture and the environment; easing learning and teaching; modifying behaviours and society.

You live in a world of targeted, well designed visual communications’ products manufactured for a purpose: billboards, ads, magazines, web sites, icons, signage, posters, maps, books, user interfaces, typefaces, easy to use teaching materials, diagrams, cartoons, animations, videos, graphs, illustrations, interactive teaching materials, warnings and warning icons, propaganda.

The work of those better designer usually goes unnoticed and unremarked upon because it modestly facilitates your actions, desires, purpose and use of your surroundings. Great design is often sadly unappreciated because it does its job quietly and well but you should make a conscious effort to notice it and learn from the better designers.

The products you did notice because they were difficult to use, unreadable, complex, cumbersome or ungainly – or were just so beautiful that they got in the way – were made by the worse designers. You can learn from them too.

Ethics.

The good and bad designers are those that do good or bad things through visual communications. Designers are taught ethics and designers sometimes have to choose. I for example refused to go into advertising which back then in my youth existed to sell tons of fags, fast cars, crap food and booze.

Visual Communications Visualised.

As shown above visual communicator are a good fit in any business. The processes of a visual communicator requires them to be good at; research skills, critical analysis, imagination, problem solving, independent thought, people skills, deadlines, communication, comprehension, big on technology, and most of all creative. Plus on top, they have graphics skills and a rare visual literacy. Perfectly suited to manage this moving image visually rich multi media information heavy networked world.