Visual Media

Visual Media

You are writing a report for the director of human resources on implementing team-based management throughout your company, which you are going to be presenting to the board. You want to emphasize that since the new approaches were implemented six months ago, absenteeism and turnover have been sharply reduced in all but two departments and you have gathered a lot of data from a variety of sources with which to support your case.

Find an business related info graphic online (please make sure you provide the link in your discussion) and do the following:

1) Analyze the info graphic using the Six Fundamental Principles of Design (pages 232-233 in the textbook). Pages are attached below.

2) Discuss whether the info graphic is created in an ethical manner and why.

Visual Design Principles

Creating effective visuals requires basic knowledge of the principles of good design.

Just as creating effective sentences and paragraphs requires working knowledge of the principles of good writing, creating effective visuals requires some knowledge of the principles of good design. Even though few businesspeople have the opportunity to formally study the “language” of line, mass, space, size, color, pattern, and texture, anyone can learn enough of the basic concepts to craft effective basic visuals.

When you encounter visuals that you find appealing or unappealing, effective or ineffective, stop and ask yourself what caused your response. Did a particular design grab you and practically force you to pay attention, or did you pass right by with hardly a notice? Did one chart reveal its information quickly and easily, while another made you spend time decoding its confusing message? Did one photo appeal to you at an emotional level and therefore draw you into a document, whereas another was off-putting and caused you to lose interest? By thinking about your own reactions to visual designs, you can become a more effective designer yourself.

As you consider your reactions to various designs and create designs of your own, you’ll begin to see how six fundamental principles help distinguish ineffective and effective designs:

· Consistency. Audiences view a series of visuals as a whole and assume that design elements will be consistent from one page to the next. Think of consistency as visual parallelism, in the same way that textual parallelism helps audiences understand and compare a series of ideas. 7 You can achieve visual parallelism in a variety of ways, including through consistent use of color, shape, size, texture, position, scale, or typeface.

· Contrast. To emphasize differences, depict items in contrasting colors, shapes, or sizes. For example, to highlight the difference between two quantities in a chart, don’t use two shades of blue; instead, use blue for one and yellow or some other dramatically contrasting color for the other.

· Balance. Balance can be either formal, in which the elements in the images are arranged symmetrically around a central point or axis, or informal, in which elements are not distributed evenly, but rather stronger and weaker elements are arranged in a way that achieves an overall effect of balance. A common approach to informal balance is weighing one visually dominant element against several smaller or weaker elements. 8 In general, formal balance is more calming and serious, whereas informal balance tends to seem more dynamic and engaging.

· Emphasis. Audiences usually assume that the dominant element in a design is the most important, so make sure that the visually dominant element really does represent the most important information. You can do so through color, position, size, or placement, for example. Conversely, be sure to visually downplay less important items. For instance, avoid using strong colors for minor support points, and deemphasize background features such as the grid lines on a chart.

· Convention. Visual communication is guided by a variety of generally accepted rules or conventions, just as written communication is guided by an array of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage conventions. These conventions dictate virtually every aspect of design. 9 Moreover, many conventions are so ingrained that people don’t even realize they are following these rules. For example, if English is your native language, you assume that ideas progress across the page from left to right because that’s the direction in which English text is written. If you are a native Arabic or Hebrew speaker, however, you might automatically assume that flow on a page or screen is from right to left because that is the direction in which those languages are written. Flouting conventions often causes breakdowns in communication, but in some cases, it can be done to great effect. 10 For instance, flipping an organizational chart upside down to put the customers at the top, with frontline employees directly beneath them and on down to the chief executive at the bottom, can be an effective way to emphasize that customers come first and that the managers are responsible for supporting employees in their efforts to satisfy customers.

· Simplicity. As a general rule, simple is better when it comes to visuals for business communication. Remember that you’re conveying information, not expressing your creative flair. Limit the number of colors and design elements you use, and take care to avoid chartjunk, a term coined by the visual communication specialist Edward R. Tufte for decorative elements that clutter documents and potentially confuse readers without adding any relevant information. 11 Computers make it far too easy to add chartjunk, from clip art illustrations to three-dimensional charts that really display only two dimensions of data.

Nearly every aspect of visual design is governed by conventions that set audience expectations.

The Ethics of Visual Communication

Remember that the power to communicate with visuals comes with the responsibility to communicate ethically.

Power always comes with responsibility—and the potential power of visuals places an ethical burden on every business communicator. Ethical problems, both intentional and unintentional, can range from photos that play on racial or gender stereotypes, to images that imply cause-and-effect relationships that may not exist, to graphs that distort data (see Figure 9.2 on the next page).

Figure 9.2 Influencing Perception Through Visual Design

Figure 9.2a shows impurities measured over the course of a 12-month period; the vertical scale is set from 0 to 120, sufficient to cover the range of variations in the data. However, what if you wanted to make the variations from month to month look more severe? Less severe? Figure 9.2b, with the scale “zoomed in” to a narrow range of 60 to 110, makes the variations look much more dramatic. The result could be a stronger emotional impact on the reader, creating the impression that these impurities are out of control. In contrast, Figure 9.2c expands the scale from 0 to 200, which minimizes the appearance of the variations in the data. This graph is visually “calmer,” creating the opposite impression—that there’s really nothing to worry about. The data shown in all three graphs are identical, but the graphs send three different messages to the reader. Are any of the graphs unethical? That depends on the communicator’s intent and whether it inhibits the audience’s ability to make informed decisions.

Altering the scale of items in a visual is just one of many ways to emphasize or deemphasize certain aspects of information. For example, to increase the perceived size of a product, an advertiser might show a close-up of it being held by someone with smaller-than-average hands. Conversely, a large hand would make the product seem smaller.

You can work to avoid ethical lapses in your visuals by following these guidelines: 12

You can take many steps to emphasize or deemphasize specific elements in your visuals, but make sure you don’t inadvertently commit an ethical lapse while doing so.

Visuals can’t always speak for themselves; make sure your audience has enough context to interpret your visuals correctly.

· Consider all possible interpretations—and misinterpretations. Try to view your visuals from your audience members’ perspective. Will their biases, beliefs, or backgrounds lead them to different conclusions than you’ve intended? For instance, assume that you want to show how easy your product is to use, and the photograph you’ve chosen just happens to show an older person operating the product. Will anyone conclude that what you really mean to say is that your product is so simple that “even an old person can use it”?

· Provide context. Even when they are completely accurate, visuals can show only a partial view of reality. Part of your responsibility as a communicator is to provide not only accurate visuals but enough background information to help audiences interpret the visual correctly.

· Don’t hide or minimize negative information that runs counter to your argument. Obscuring information prevents your audiences from making fully informed decisions regarding your content.

· Don’t exaggerate information that supports your argument. Similarly, you have a responsibility not to oversell information in support of your argument. You should also resist the temptation to alter or enhance photographs and other images in order to support your arguments.

· Don’t oversimplify complex situations. By their very nature, visuals tend to present simplified views of reality. This is usually a benefit and one of the key reasons for using visuals. However, take care not to mislead an audience by hiding complications that are important to the audience’s understanding of the situation.

· Don’t imply cause-and-effect relationships without providing proof that they exist. For example, if you create a line chart that shows how increasing sales seem to track with increasing advertising expenditures, you can claim a correlation but not necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. You can claim a causal relationship (meaning that the increase in advertising spending caused the increase in sales) only if you can isolate advertising spending as the only factor that can account for the increase in sales.

· Avoid emotional manipulation or other forms of coercion. For instance, a photograph of an unhappy child being treated as a social outcast because he or she doesn’t own the trendiest new toys could be considered an unethical way to persuade parents to buy those products for their children.

· Be careful with the way you aggregate data. Preparing charts, graphs, and tables that present data often involves decisions about aggregating, or grouping, data. Such decisions can have a profound effect on the message your audience receives (see  “Ethics Detective: Solving the Case of the Hidden Numbers” ). For example, if you aggregate daily production levels to show only a single data point for each week, you might be obscuring important variations that happen from day to day.

The ways in which you aggregate data for display can affect the messages and meanings that your audience extracts from your visuals.