Visual Communication: Your Most Effective Message Vehicle

Whether you realise it or not, humans are visual creatures. And by that, we mean that humans receive, process, and store visual messages to memory much quicker than any other forms. And that includes complex language based messages too. So what better way to convey your brand message?

What Does It Mean By “Visual Communications”?

As mentioned above, humans are visual beings. We tend to understand messages much quicker via visual messages than any other means. And no, I don’t mean visually reading a text message.

Imagine this, you’re speeding along the highway, when you drive past a huge billboard on your left. You probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to read the title on the board, let alone the message below the title. But what you did see was the pretty pictures on it.

So how does it happen?… When it comes to receiving and understanding a worded message, the language used as the vehicle used to convey it. And complex language needs a lot of brain power to process it. You first need to visualise the message, then assign the alphabets to the visual image to decode it. Once you “know” the words, you string those “words” together to form the “sentence”. And from there, you translate the message via the language that was used. Once you have all that message decoded, you’ll need to “deduce” what it really means, and what message the writer wants to convey to you.

It all seems pretty fast, but that’s because your brain is a pretty impressive organic computer that can work pretty darn fast…




But this is nothing compared to seeing a visual image, and you can pretty much understand what the message really is all about. You go from direct from visualising the image to deducing the message. You’ll completely skip assigning the alphabets, the forming the words, stringing the sentences, and best of all, you don’t even need to know any languages either. You simply just understand what it all means.

The Human Brain Is A Pretty Complex And Impressive Organ

While the brain is a pretty impressive organ, it’s also a very lazy one too. So if there are shortcuts available, you can bet your bottom dollar that your brain will choose to take the shortcut.

Processing a complex language (as in the various human languages) in the brain takes a big toll on the resources. There’s no doubt, the modern human’s brain is more than capable to handle such complex tasks regularly. But given a choice between processing complex languages and processing simple visual images, we all know which path the brain will ultimately choose. And this isn’t a voluntary action either. It all happens automatically, without us even knowing what’s going on.

Back to the billboard that just zipped pass you on your left. You probably missed the words completely, but you’ll most definitely remember the image that was printed on the billboard. And if that particular image has a “hidden message”, whether it’s a photo, a graphic, or even just colours, you can bet that you’ve already understood that message.

So if your advertiser is worth his salt, he’ll know how to embed the message that you want to tell right there in the visuals itself.

“Sorry, But I’m Still Not Convinced!”

Let’s take the message “I’m Hungry” as an example. The words itself doesn’t really mean much if read in isolation. So you’re gonna have to read it, recognise the words, understand what it says, and then deduce what it all means. Here, take a look :-

Knowing what it says is one thing. But understanding what the underlying message means is completely different animal altogether. And to get there, you’ll have to know the words, and understand the words in combination, before you can put them into context.

Of course, you could always decorate those words into pretty little “worded image”. Perhaps it’ll attract some additional attention too. But to get to the bottom of the message, the reader still has to process the message. There’s just no way around it…

Nope, your brain still needs to go through the whole shebang, the whole nine yards… It may look more attractive than the earlier example. But for you to interpret what the “prettier looking” message really said, you still need to process and interpret the words.  That’s right, it’s still words. And it’s still a complex language.

So how to you eliminate all the words, and tap straight into the brain’s emotion processing area?…

Visuals – The Most Effective Way To Convey Your Message

Whether you believe it or not, the most effective way to convey your message, is with visuals. That’s the shortcut that your brain will choose to take if that option is available.

It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t exactly say the words “I’m Hungry!”, but the emotions behind the image is enough to entice your hunger pangs to start rumbling. And we all know exactly what it means when your stomach start to rumble, right?…

Once you’ve seen the image, you’ll go, “Oh yeah, I see it now…” But before we gave you that example, how many of you actually realised just how powerful a visual image really is?

And more importantly, how many of you even realised that you can actually apply that to business communications? The most obvious application would be your corporate logo, corporate colours, corporate stationeries, packaging materials, business cards, so on and so forth.

Oh Wow!… So Any Tips On Corporate  Logo Design?…

Of course we have tips… In the next article, we’ll touch on some common characteristics of an effective logo. So don’t forget to come back for it. But if you can’t wait for the next article to be published, you’re most welcome to contact us for a no commitment discussion.