UNDERSTANDING VISUAL COMMUNICATION
Project teams from Stone Yamashita Partners (profiled in the chapter-opening "Communication Close-Up) look for new ways to connect and explore business ideas through creative
visuals, often helping clients see important concepts and relationships that weren't obvious using textual communication alone. Although the primary focus of this course is written messages,visual communication has become an important skill for today's business professionals
and managers. This chapter helps you appreciate the power of images and the visualevolution of business communication. It then explains how to identify which points in your messages to illustrate; how to select the best visual for each of those points; and how to create
effective visuals in any media, from memos to reports to webpages to electronic presentations.The Power of Images
Well-designed visual elements can enhance the communication power of textual messages and, in some instances, even replace textual messages. Visuals can often convey some message points (such as spatial relationships, correlations, procedures, and emotions) more effectively and more efficiently than words. Generally speaking, in a given amount of time,
well-designed images can convey much more information than text.2 In the numbersoriented world of work, people rely heavily on trend lines, distribution curves, and visualpresentations of numerical quantities. Visuals attract and hold people's attention, helping
your audience understand and remember your message. Busy readers often jump to visuals
to try to get the gist of a message, and attractive visuals can draw readers deeper into your
reports and presentations. Pictures are also an effective way to communicate with the diverse
audiences that are common in today's business environment.
In addition to their direct information value, visuals often convey connotative meaning
as well. As you read in Chapter 5, many words and phrases carry connotative meanings,which are all the mental images, emotions, and other impressions that the word or phraseevokes in audience members. A significant part of the power-and risk-of visual elements
derives from their connotative meanings as well. Even something as simple as a watermarksymbol embedded in letterhead stationery can boost reader confidence in whatever messageis printed on the paper.3 Many colors, shapes, and other design elements have visual
symbolism; and their symbolic, connotative meaning can evolve over time and mean different.
The Visual Evolution in Business Communication
Several technological and social factors are contributing to the increasing use-and importance-of visuals in business communication. The process of creating and working with visual elements used to be the domain of experts with complex and expensive
tools. However, digital technology has changed this situation dramatically. Digital cameras that can produce high-quality images and video are inexpensive and easy enough for anyone to use; the software needed to create diagrams, process photos, edit video, and
prepare other visual elements continues to get both easier and more powerful all the time; the global reach of the Internet makes it easy to send images almost instantly; and more Internet users have high-speed connections that can handle the larger computer files that visuals tend to require. Design and production tasks that used to take days can now be completed in hours or even minutes. As technologies such as wireless networking continue to advance, business communicators will continue to reach wider audiences
in less time, using equipment that costs less and requires fewer skills.4 While technology has been putting visual design and production into the hands of everyday business communicators in recent years, audience skills and expectations havebeen evolving as well. Two changes in particular could affect your communication efforts in the coming years. First, U.S. government research indicates that only half of the adult population in the United States now have the literacy skills considered necessary for success in today's workplace.5 In other words, depending on the nature of your work, you could find yourself communicating with audiences whose skills could keep them from successfully reading your documents. Visuals could play a vital role in communicating
your messages to audiences with lower reading skills. Second, as technology has multiplied the ways in which communicators can create visuals and as people grow up and live in a more visual, media-saturated environment, audiences may well expectmessages to be more visual. As a result of these changes in both the tools and the communication environment,visual literacy, the ability (as a sender) to create effective images and (as a receiver) to correctly interpret visual messages, has become a key business skill.6 Whether you need
to use images to reach an audience with limited reading skills or want to use images tomagnify the impact of your written messages, knowing how to help your audience see what you see will help you become a more effective communicator.
Visual Design Principles
Just as creating effective sentences, paragraphs, and documents requires working knowledge
of the principles of good writing, creating effective visuals requires some knowledge of the principles of good design. Even though few businesspeople have the opportunity to formally study the "language"of line, mass, space, size, color, pattern, and texture, anyone
can learn enough of the basic concepts to craft effective basic visuals. When you encounter visuals that you find appealing or unappealing, or effective or ineffective, stop and ask yourself why you responded the way you did. Did a particular
design grab you and practically force you to pay attention, or did you pass right by with hardly a notice? Did one graph reveal its information quickly and easily while another
The Ethics of Visual Communication
Power always comes with responsibility-and the potential power of visuals places an ethical burden on every business communicator. This situation involves not only the obvious requirement of avoiding intentional ethical lapses but the more complicated and often more
subtle requirement of avoiding unintentional lapses as well. Ethical problems can range from photos that play on racial or gender stereotypes to images that imply cause-and-effect relationships that may not exist to graphs that distort data (see Figure 12.4).
Just as subtle word choices shade the meaning of your writing, seemingly minor design
variations can influence the message your readers take away from your business graphics.