Key Techniques in Visual Communication
Visual Communication Techniques
Balance
This technique is based on human perception, and there is a center of gravity midway between two steps.
Instability
It is the lack of balance and visual expressions with disturbing results.
Regularity
Uniformity is the order of elements in which no deviations are allowed.
Irregularity
Enhances the unexpected without following any plan.
Simplicity
It imposes directness and a simple form, free from complications.
Complexity
It involves a visual complication due to the presence of many units, resulting in a difficult process of organization.
Unit
It is a proper balance of elements in a totality.
Fragmentation
Is the breakdown of elements into separate pieces that are related to each other but retain their individual character.
Economy
Presence of minimal units of visual aids.
Profusion
This technique is very rich visually, overloaded, and is associated with power and wealth.
Transparency
It involves a visual record through which you can see.
Opacity
This technique represents the blockade and the concealment of visual elements.
Realism
Natural technical camera and visual experience of things as natural.
Distortion
It aims to control the effects, deviating from the contours and sometimes regular form.
Plane
Absence of perspective.
Depth
Suggests the natural appearance of the dimension.
Activity
It should reflect the movement through the representation or suggestion.
Passivity
This technique produces an absolute balance and an effect of rest.
Predictability
Submits an order or conventional plan.
Spontaneity
Technical, impulsive, emotionally charged, and overflowing.
Continuity
It is defined by an uninterrupted series of visual connections.
Episodic
Disconnection reinforces the individual nature of the constituent parts of a whole.
Sequentiality
Provision presents a logical sequence.
Randomness
It gives the impression of a lack of plan, a planned disruption.
Reluctance
Technique pursuing a maximum response from the viewer with minimal elements.
Exaggeration
Intensifies and extends the visual expression.
Elements of the Communication Process
- Transmitter and Receiver: The issuer is the element that is responsible for providing information, as well as the receiver to receive it. Although sometimes it is not easy to distinguish clearly between sender and receiver in the communication process because they exchange their roles alternately.
Although, generally, the issuer is inseparable from its receptor, there may be cases where there is a receiver and multiple transmitters or one transmitter and multiple receivers. For example, a political rally or television systems, where a broadcast station distributes an electromagnetic signal to multiple receivers, or in the case of a news agency in which there is a single receiver and multiple transmitters in the same round the world.
- Message: These are the ideas that make themselves all stimuli intended to convey the sender to the receiver; a codified set of rules, signs, and symbols, known both for further understanding. It is the informational content. May be contained in a text, to be expressed through verbal or nonverbal ways. Is the fundamental element of the communication process, as its purpose is the transmission of it. Hernández Mendo and Garay (in press) make a consideration of the message as “written expression, verbal or nonverbal an idea, a feeling or an emotion on a real or abstract referent (present or absent), using for this purpose a common code for people involved in the communicative act.”
- Code: What are the system of signs and rules that allow us to formulate and understand a message. It is vital for the proper development of the process transmitter and receiver to share the same code. The existence of a code involves two processes, encoding and decoding. Encryption is the process of producing the message by the issuer (Serrano, 1992), while the term decoding means re-translation of the message to extract its meaning (and Windhal McQuail, 1997).
- Context: Political, historical, cultural, or other nature, which depend on the meaning and value of a word, phrase, or fact considered communicative. In turn, within the context referred to the contact, the reference, and the ecological environment, biological, sociological, and psychological relationship.
- Channel or Medium: It is only a “lane” (Shannon, 1975). It is the instrument through which the realization is made the message element that is responsible for the transport of the signal on which information travels seeking to exchange transmitter and receiver. Is the channel through which the message. Includes the natural organs (sight, hearing) and the hardware extension of the same (one cable, film, press, etc..) Allow the receiver senses awareness, especially sight and hearing. Each channel of transmission is appropriate for some concrete signs, and not all are used for any type of signal.
Other important aspects of the communication process are: the aim of the message, which establishes the “intent” of communication, interpretation or conversion of the message based on values and codes that the receiver handles the effect, this is the result obtained through the message, and, finally, the feedback from the entire process from the receptor, shifting its role sender and consequently the initial sender to receiver.