Step up your graphic design game

Last Thursday, Dr. Paul Broomhead stood on a chair in front of his 200-student choir at Brigham Young University, his hands making different shapes as he spoke about air support, vowels, and sound.

“I need you to sustain!”

The choir was struggling to understand what he meant by ‘sustain’—most of the students were not music majors, and many didn’t even know how to read sheet music. 

Dr. Broomhead then stepped down from the chair and grabbed a dry-erase marker. Moving to the whiteboard, he drew five triangles in a row moving like a conveyor belt and numbered them.

“This is how you’re singing right now,” he explained. “You start off strong on each beat, but you’re not keeping it even all the way through the measure. I want you to sing it like this.”

He then drew a rectangle and divided it into five sections that corresponded with the triangles. “When I ask for sustain, this is what I mean. Pick up to measure forty-four; let’s make it sound like this.”

The pianist led the choir into measure forty-four of “Brother James’s Air,” a reverent piece written by Mack Wilberg. Suddenly, the voices came together. The ensemble was able to create a more even, sustained sound all the way through the verse.

What changed?

Dr. Broomhead showed them a visual representation of the sound he was looking for.

This is just one example of the many different contexts in which we find visual communications.

What is “Visual Communication”?

Canva—a well-established design site—defines visual communication as “the process of using visual elements to convey ideas, information, and data.” The design world largely confines “visual communication” to these parameters, referring almost exclusively to graphic assets or diagrams. My approach, however, is a little broader: I define visual communications as using design and language together to speak visually.

In the world of music, Dr. Broomhead and other conductors use gesture, shape, descriptive language, and a unique system of written sheet music to help groups of people synthesize their efforts in performances. Consider other disciplines wherein visual communication can make all the difference; right off the top of my head, I think of these:

• Education: visual teaching materials simplify new concepts for students at all levels of study, promoting increased comprehension and learning.
• Business: marketing, sales, branding, visual voice, persuasion, communication, presentations… the visual narrative of a company can be the deciding factor in whether they stand out or get lost in the oversaturated world of content.
• Engineering & Construction: blueprints, illustrations, and even road signs utilize this idea of visual communication. Accuracy in both art and language is key to a successful project.
• Language: teaching new languages with visual aids helps nonnative speakers. Visual communication can also be found in the conducting of music, and plays an especially important role in American Sign Language (which I studied for 4 years).
• Life & Family Sciences: charts, illustrations, and diagrams can help us conceptualize and communicate otherwise abstract concepts.

The truth: visual communications are applicable anywhere.

It’s intimidating to challenge the design world on what is or isn’t visual communication, but stick with me. Take a look at this blog post, any article, or an assigned research reading for class. Your eyes are met with lines upon lines of text; if you’re lucky, the authors use some headers and negative space to break it up.

Unless you’re super passionate about the topic and willing to dive deep into all that information, chances are it looks pretty overwhelming. At best you’re going to skim it before you become occupied with something else.

Most people nowadays are conditioned to have particularly short attention spans; they no longer want to read the whole paper with breakfast. They can hardly even listen to a song all the way through before skipping it! Instead, they’re scrolling on their phones looking for the bullet point highlights, carousels with quick picture flip-throughs, or infographics that quickly walk them through a concept.

Effective graphic design is all about utilizing the industry principles surrounding color, typography, et cetera to capture our audience in those precious moments when they see your content. With such a narrow window given to connect with the viewer, it is crucial for graphic designers to equip themselves with every possible tool to push them towards success. In addition to color, text, arrangement, and so on, graphic designers need to master the art of language and put power behind every word. This mastery of both language and design is where we find that space which takes design to the next level: the space of visual communications.

There is SO much to explore in this realm.

The most powerful tool a designer can master is the ability to speak visually. It’s this that we see behind Dr. Broomhead’s visualization strategy as he faced his group of singers: Instead of lecturing half of them on how to read the marks of the sheet music or scolding them for their illiteracy, he united the choir with words and visual illustrations of gesture and shape, thus connecting to them in a universal language: visual communications.