Like my essay on “virtuality”, this essay is exactly what it says on the label: the entry for visual communication in a design dictionary — specifically, Michael Erlhoff and Tim Marshall, eds., Design Dictionary: Perspectives on Design Terminology (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008; available via the Internet Archive). The Dictionary was simultaneously published in English and German; the German translation of this essay is here.
Visual Communication
Visual communication is an artificial phrase intended to describe the combination of textual, figurative, formal, and/or time-based elements to convey meanings greater than the sum of the parts — that is, not merely to convey ideas but to do so with heightened effect.
The phrase “Visual Communication” arose in European and American higher educational circles in the 1980s and 1990s to supersede the phrase “communication design”; communication design had been adopted in the same milieu in the early 1970s to supersede W. A. Dwiggins’s phrase (→) “graphic design” (coined in 1922, but popularized after the Second World War). The dynamics that drove these two renamings were very different; but neither phrase ever came into sufficiently widespread use outside of the academy to supplant graphic design.
Communication design was adopted in the context of newly popularized theories of media associated with theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. The phrase was more aspirational than accurate: it reflected the optimism with which graphic-design techniques were being applied on larger scales in many senses. On the one hand, advertising (→ Advertisement) was becoming increasingly systematic in its aim of projecting unified identities and ideas across nations using all available media; on the other hand, efforts to project institutional identities onto and into quasi-public spaces (for example, theme parks and events such as the Olympics or the World Fair) provided compelling examples of an intuitive and accessible internationalism.
These expanding possibilities did not result from fundamental changes in the practice of visual design. Instead, they reflected changes outside the field — notably the growing interest in a wide range of “communication”-related practices by sponsors, mainly in the commercial sector. This rising prestige was crucial for visually oriented practices, which had often been relegated to secondary status alongside other more “authorial,” verbally oriented practices; but it was in no way limited to them. Interest extended across numerous fields, from electrical engineering to sociology. Not surprisingly, then, “communication”-related specialties and entities proliferated across the academy. This proliferation gradually led to administrative confusion within the academy.
It was against this backdrop, decades later, that the phrase visual communication was nominated as an alternative to communication design. Only so much precision can be attributed to any two-word phrase, of course, but the thrust of the new phrase was to prevent confusion by limiting the scope of the practice to visual fields. In doing so, it implicitly distinguished vocationally oriented programs centered on visual (→ practice from professionally oriented social-scientific programs centered on scholarship, research, and policy. Given these inward-looking, administrative motives for introducing the phrase, it is hardly surprising that it has not come into popular use. Outside of the academy, it mainly serves as a self-consciously broad category that encompasses the creation and appreciation of entire swaths of visual culture, from the intentionally professional and to the naively vernacular.
Even within the academy, the introduction of the phrase visual communication has been a step backward in some respects. Historically, it coincided with the rapid adoption of digital computers as the predominant tool in virtually every aspect of creative processes, from the development of component media (writing, image, form, collage) through entire cycles of production and distribution. Yet rapid increases in the capability, sophistication, and integration of these devices have also driven more complex forms of hybrid media: in terms of production, by enabling visual designers to explore time-based, interactive, and audio forms and integrate it into their practice; and, in terms of reception, by enabling audiences to do the same, thereby fueling demand for hybrid media. In this regard, it is unfortunate that the phrase visual communication was introduced just when technical advances enabling mass hybrid media made the possibilities implicit in the communication design more accessible.
Yet it is also true that academic and institutional graphic-design culture showed little interest in the emergence of early interactive and time-based media (→ Interface Design, Time-based Design). There were pragmatic reasons for this. Traditionally, the field had been animated by a craft-oriented (→ Craft) attention to subtlety, precision, and fidelity in (→) typography, image, color, and abstract form; but early computers (whether time-sharing systems or, later, personal computers) were unable to attain anything close to the accustomed finish or quality of “analog” techniques. For example, early digital typesetting was a poor approximation compared to its optically generated counterparts; and digital color quality and consistency was crude compared with the flexibility of pigment-based systems. (A notable exception was digital image processing, which was widely embraced by professionals and amateurs alike.)
However, digital technologies developed much more rapidly and systematically than specialized fields of practice such as graphic design were able to absorb. As a result, these specialist fields of practice adopted only very limited aspects of these new technical capabilities. Thus, while the practice of graphic design struggled, to good and bad effect, with what came to be called “desktop publishing” (in essence, digitized page layout and image-processing), it failed to respond organically to other crucial developments such as the sudden rise of the Internet. In that sense, then, the unrealized promise of the ambitious name communication design - exemplified in the communitarian, organicist, and utopian thinking of McLuhan — made the older name something of a misnomer. In this regard, visual communication has the virtue of being more accurate.
This complex dialog between the field and its rapidly changing technical circumstances was neither simply a myopic failure to adapt nor a valiant stewardship of tradition. Instead, the continuity of concern stems mainly from the peculiar understanding of (→) “communication” that dominates the field. Unlike two-way systems such as telephony, for example, which assume a free-form, negotiative understanding of communication, visual communication is a “one-way” activity oriented toward the transmission of ideas, associations, and feelings. This admittedly reductive understanding can be traced to the origins of graphic design per se, namely, the mass production of print materials using techniques derived from lithography and/or photography. (Of course, component or contributing disciplines such as typography and (→ illustration claim older his- tories and mythologies.) Though very flexible in their capacity to integrate a wide variety of textual, figurative, and abstract media and forms, the ultimate goal of these techniques is to fix constituent elements into more or less static forms; the resulting artifacts serve as the vehicles of standardized visual communication.
Yet with the seemingly inexorable spread of digital devices, which typically rely on ever more complex or detailed manual interaction (as distinct from the conceptual or cognitive interaction that a book, for example, relies on to “work”), traditional assumptions about “static” or “standardized” forms are becoming increasingly problematic. In many contexts where print and other fixed formats have been dominant, the iterative, real-time creation and consumption of communicative activity and artifacts is becoming common. Despite the bombast of successive waves of futuristic rhetoric (predicting the “death of the book,” denigrating paper as “dead trees,” and so on), these innovations are integrated in every way and at every stage with the traditions of visual communication, whatever it is called.
What is changing very decisively, though, is the reductive, one-way (→ understanding of communication. Interactions that previously might have taken the form of marginal notes or heavily thumbed sections of a book are now giving way to feedback-oriented systems (for example, through the use of browser cookies and digital rights management authorization techniques) that give authors, designers, publishers, and/or distributors more detailed access to how their audiences, individually and collectively, interact with aspects of their artifacts and systems. While markedly different from the free-form, negotiative understanding of communication of telephony, these forms of feedback nevertheless tend to promote an increasingly bivalent understanding of communication. In doing so, they are likely to undermine some of the most basic assumptions that have shaped visual communications — while, at the same time, continuing to affirm its coequal status alongside other, more verbally oriented authorial practices.
→ Communications, Discipline, Visualization, Web Design