Visual Communication: ITAP Lecture 5

DESIGN PROCESS

This week ITAP lecture was about the importance of the design process when creating visual messages and building communication with the audience.

The first principle I want to talk about is Legibility.

Legibility is the degree to which individual characters in the text are understandable and recognizable based on their appearance.

It is very easy to lose meaning and purpose of our aim if we don’t follow some rules. First of all is to recognise the audience and choose appropriate style. In writing or text and image that includes: typeface, font size, clear image, composition, paragraphs, colour, spacing, alignment, layout of the image and text on the page and additional content together, all the above must be suitable for presented image to communicate the right message. There are other rules when creating magazine layouts: columns, margins, headlines, sub headlines etc. It is good to ask ourselves a question: Does it connect with the target audience? We must decide on the level of legibility depending on the purpose and the audience. It is also used in commercial visual communication such as maps, signs, instructions etc. Each project has a different purpose for instance informative, instructing, persuasive or convincing. If our goal is to clearly inform the target group and enable them to gain information the above rules can help to maintain final outlook. Whereas when we use words overlapping the image it might be illegible.

I think is very important to make my blog legible and for that reason I have used bigger font size , a clear typeface, chosen colours of font and background.

Tone of voice

Tone of voice must be taken into consideration when we aim to communicate visually with a target audience. Very often, apart from the image, we also apply text which more distinctively emphasises the message we are sending. We do not always appreciate that Typography is everywhere. It is a huge part of advertising, publishing, packaging etc.

It is particularly chosen for certain groups of people create the right impression and reaction, for instance to buy the advertised product.

We can find Ideal connection of text and image in the ‘Sex has consequences’ advertisement for The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Tony Arefin is a graphic designer who cleverly works with typography and very often combines it with photography. The theme of the campaign is to encourage teenagers to have safe sex. He uses very strong quotes and picks out words highlighting the valuable meaning for the theme. He accentuates the words even more using strong red colour which is a very emotionally intense and stimulates people to make a quick decision but also indicates danger.