The ABCs Of Visual Communication Design Decoded
Last update: 9 August 2023 at 11:12 am
3.00/5The core responsibility of visual communication design is to develop and nurture the relationship between the viewer and visuals.
To create the desired impact, set design characteristics, and instilling emotional responses are among its major objectives.
In a way, they design the experience of how various design elements capture a viewer’s attention first, create common associations that customers have, and the psychology behind how various elements affect someone’s mood.
A decent visual communication strategy in your graphic design helps create faster connections than merely using words, but make sure that messaging is compelling and clear.
Without wasting much time, let’s quickly dive into the article, which will make you understand it better.
What Is Visual Communication?
Visual communication conveys information and data using different mediums. Its examples are animation, graphic design, color, diagrams, images, text, drawings, prints, gestures, illustrations, infographics, and typography.
It is an important concept in graphic design enabling two or more two people to communicate their messages, ideas, and thoughts effectively.
Sharing meaningful content and information with the audience is the priority here. This is also its basic difference from art pieces. It is at the core of all marketing assets, be it web design or posters.
Importance Of Visual Communication In Graphic Design
It is undeniably at the core of any graphic design strategy and empowers businesses to communicate more precisely with their target audiences in a natural way.
It is necessary for a brand to master the art of communicating visually. Since graphic design-based insights can express complex information in various multiple layers to create integrated marketing materials with seamless redistribution capabilities.
How Graphic Design Impacts Your Audience?
- Visual communication delivers a refined tone to an audience, from stroke weight to visual combined aesthetic choices, data visualization style, and information to tell a unified story.
- Making the UI clear, and appealing through graphic design elements helps educate and encourage the target audiences.
- Well-curated graphic design provides more meaning to the message and thus helps people to connect, observe, communicate and engage with the subject directly.
- Smartly curated graphic design helps individuals to retain information. It is a fact that human beings can remember things that they have seen longer than the things they have heard about.
- It develops emotions, and people can relate to the topic easily due to the value being delivered like that in the case of an art form.
- Graphic design helps businesses align team members and employees with different companies’ processes.
- Good graphic design also helps save time as it quickly conveys major points to the audience.
Different Types Of Visual Communication Methods Used As Marketing Materials
You can consider it as the art of connecting with people and creating a psychological impact through graphical information. Also, it refers to the presentation of messages through media like images and infographics.
Ever since technology helped graphic design transit beyond fine arts it is flourishing. Let us now also learn about its types apart from simple images:
Projector Slides
Projector slides displayed on the overhead projector are one of the most famous types of marketing materials used in C-suite meetings and now in webinars.
Using projector slides helps you to emphasize graphical information reinforced with text. But their main advantage lies in setting a narrative without pouring in exhaustive data.
Slides in such cases can be managed in three ways – pre-prepared slides that are words or images that are handwritten or drawn, spontaneously developed slides that are written while you speak to illustrate your points, and a combined design of these two.
As a rule of thumb, all design elements should create a coinciding impact on the central theme.
Whiteboard Or Blackboard
Whiteboards or blackboards are used to explain notions in the old school way. You can use them to clarify the title when you are presenting or introducing or just to record the main key points.
It is always better to write it on the board instead of being descriptive, including important steps that you want people to take note of.
Virtual whiteboards can prove to be very helpful as they create a strong marketing appeal despite their laidback design. Here you don’t need to erase what you have written like you used to do while using a physical whiteboard, and you can just save it for future reference for your other team members.
Infographics
Infographics are the visual representation of data and information, making them a core element of graphic design these days. The collection of charts, imagery, and minimal text creates an easy-to-understand illustration of a topic.
Videos
Video is the most preferred form that can serve as the medium to introduce new products to the entire organization.
Check out one of our Sortlist studies on how different generations use social tools to see just how much of an impact video has on today’s way of consumption.
It can be used for training purposes, advertisements, tutorials, motion study, and documentation purposes.
When any product or service is introduced, a video helps to let the whole organization know about it, and at the same time, answers every question that the employees may have by serving as a proper illustration.
Design Elements Of Visual Communication For Branding
In this section, we will understand how the design elements contribute to building a user experience. They are the basics that graphic design students learn before laying their hands on industry-inspired projects, so you can go through them to brush off the basics:
Shape
A shape is a 2D enclosure. It can be better made with lines (straight/curved, intersecting, and non-intersecting) or a ‘fill’ (shade, color, or texture).
When asked to develop a shape, designers need to demonstrate their understanding of how shapes influence the viewer’s thought process.
The shape is a common component in both illustration and logos. Shapes communicate emotions optically. Thus they help infuse brand language in designs.
If you are thinking of redesigning your company logo, don’t hesitate to ask for some help from a logo graphic design agency in the United Kingdom.
Colour
As a part of graphic design, colors create psychological impact, and they also determine how the audience perceives your brand in terms of the idea, notions, and socio-economic associations.
It is important to note that packaging (physical) and digital color schemes can vary in the actual application, so your graphic design team needs to approach both of them systematically to create and maintain uniformity.
Texture
Texture refers to the surface of an image and it can be implied or actual.
“Actual Texture” can be felt with the help of our hands, while “Implied Texture” looks like real texture, although it might be printed on gloss paper in the case of packaging graphic design.
Texture can make an impact on viewers’ perception, which ultimately determines your brand positioning in the case of digital platforms.
Tone
The tone is a contrast of intensity of color. The tone is described with adjectives such as dark and light. The discussion of the tone includes percentage, shade, tint, and value.
Tones refer to the variation in range in a monochromatic field and can be put into any color except white. The tone is used to emphasize form with linear or radial gradients.
These terms are usually related to digital artwork design, but harnessing it the right way is equally beneficial for graphic design applications like packaging materials. In terms of design language, it helps create depth to the emotional intensity of the colors.
Typefaces
Typefaces refer to fonts in graphic design. It is a design element that communicates through the aesthetic of the type forms and meaning of words forms themselves.
Typography has a deep impact on how a person perceives your copy, and it also impacts their interpretation.
Typography is divided into certain groups for uses, interpretations, and analysis, with Sans and Sans Serif being the two commonly used distinctions.
From a branding POV, slim and tall fonts indicate aesthetic beauty while short and bulky typography translates to stability. Thus, the decision regarding their use for design purposes is taken from both marketing and branding perspectives.
What Is Graphic Design & How It Is Different From Visual Communication?
Graphic design for marketing is the planning and projection of experiences and ideas with the help of visual and textual content.
Another word for graphic designing is communication designing. Graphic design includes several specializations like computer graphic design, motion graphics, animation, and website graphic design.
The Difference Between Visual Communication And Graphic Design
Visual communication is focused on expressing valuable insights that can speed up decision-making. Graphic design, on the other hand, is a broader concept that also includes other uses of visually displayed information.
The element of generating commercial value for intended stakeholders is the key difference between the two.
Summing Up
Thus, we can agree to the fact that visual communication should proactively define how you approach graphic design.
If kept unchecked, it may also create unwanted design characteristics and ultimately sabotage your marketing efforts. We would like to add that in this era of digitized data consumption over web and software tools, you should have a full-fledged graphic design strategy to meet your marketing goals.
