In this short video (about seven minutes) I introduce some basic principles of visual language: Forms, fields and flows. I think of this as the “alphabet” of visual language. This set of principles is the primary set of marks you need in order to create visual meaning.
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A short video introduction to some basic principles of visual language.
Tue, Apr 8, 2008
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8 comments
This is wonderful!!
The way you explained it made me feel like it was so easy to communicate visually. It led me to a path to try communication visually.
Wish for more of these kind of lessons for faster improvement of my communication, Thank you
Loved it.
I was initially excited because I am a form & questionnaire designer and thought you were going to talk about my profession.
I suppose that’s an unavoidable overlap in terminology.
But seriously, I thought this was a really clean and simple but comprehensive model for understanding visual language. Great stuff!
Formulate: That’s funny. If we were using visual language there would have been no ambiguity there
Glad you enjoyed the video.
It would be interesting to explore how these ideas could be helpful when designing the kinds of forms you specialize in.
Re: “That’s funny. If we were using visual language there would have been no ambiguity there
”
I suspect we would have still needed some words to clarify the images, but you’re right that using words on their own is what lead to confusion!
Re: “It would be interesting to explore how these ideas could be helpful when designing the kinds of forms you specialize in.”
I design any kind of forms but for all, the idea of “flow” is central. I have a model for forms that divides them into 4 layers (see http://formulate.com.au/articles/layers-of-a-form/) of which one is Flow – the relationship between questions on the form. Get the flow wrong and you have a form that doesn’t make sense and/or creates unnecessary burden.
To really complicate things, applying your model to my model, we could say that the questions are forms (each has it’s own “shape”, “colour” and “meaning”)!
Formulate.
This just highlights the need for some shared language that we can use to talk about these things!
Dave
HIDave,
I was wondering if you could explain why you use these terms of (Flow, Form and Field) in stead of the visual art terms of line, shape, and composition?
You could substitute line and shape for flows and forms, but when I talk about fields I mean something very different than what is typically meant by composition.
A-W-E-S-O-M-E content Dave. Thank you for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate it!
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