Visual Communication - scope, careers, colleges, skills, jobs, salary

Definition

“Communicate with visual literacy – Make good use of all the non-verbal ways of communication – color, shape, form, texture”. ~ Marty Sklar

“The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images”. ~Luigi Ghirri

Visual communication (Viscom) is communication through a visual aid and is described as the conveyance of ideas and information in forms that can be read or looked upon. Visual communication in part or whole relies on vision, and is primarily presented or expressed with two-dimensional images. It includes: signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, industrial design, advertising, animation color and electronic resources. It also explores the idea that a visual message accompanying text has a greater power to inform, educate, or persuade a person or audience.

Visual communication is carried out through visual aids. The evaluation of a good visual communication design is mainly based on measuring comprehension by the audience, not on personal aesthetic and/or artistic preference as there are no universally agreed-upon principles of beauty and ugliness. Excluding two dimensional images, there are other ways to express information visually – gestures and body language, animation (digital or analogue), and film. Visual communication by e-mail, a textual medium, is commonly expressed with ASCII art, emoticons, and embedded digital images.

• Students studying visual communication are taught the basic physics of light, anatomy and physiology of the eye, cognitive and perception theories, color theories, Gestalt psychology, aesthetics, natural reading patterns, design principles, semiotics, persuasion, camera/filming actions and image-types, and so forth. Colleges for visual communications differ in their approach, but most combine theory and practice in some form.
• Visual communication takes place through pictures, graphs and charts, as well as through signs, signals and symbols. It may be used either independently or as an adjunct to the other methods of communication.