Hi, everybody. My name is Mario. And I'd like to welcome you to our first lesson in the visual designing communications pathway.
Now, today's lesson is going to focus on visual communication, as the title says. And it's going to introduce you to various theories and perspectives, and sort of the basics on how visual communication actually works. So feel free throughout this lesson to pause, fast forward, and rewind as you see fit. And when you're ready to go, let's dive in.
So as I mentioned, we will introduce various theories and perspectives on how visual communication actually works. But before we get there, what is visual communication? How do we define it?
Visual communication is a process, by which an image conveys some sort of idea or message to an audience in order to inform, sell, persuade, educate, or entertain. And it relies heavily on both, the biology of human vision and the viewer's past experience.
Now, various practitioners and companies, organizations of many different backgrounds and disciplines will communicate visually. So it's extremely, extremely important to understand just how viewers actually collect and interpret that visual information to be more effective. So on a typical day, as I'm sure you can imagine, a person will encounter various types of visual communication in form of packages, labels, ads, newspapers, magazines, movies, TV, and much, much more. So the better you understand how visual input is interpreted, then the more likely you are to effectively communicate to the viewer.
So we're going to proceed to a few of the theories here in visual communication for the lesson. And just keep in mind that we'll be jumping into more specific examples on just how these models work later in this unit. So it should be pretty short and sweet here.
So let's start with perceptual communication model. What is that? So the perceptual communications model is a visual communication theory, which focuses on a viewer's personal interpretation and prior experiences. And we'll touch more on this later on as we continue.
The next theory here is the sensory communications models, which is a theory that focuses strictly on data that enters the brain. And then, lastly, we have the transmission model, which is a model adopted by many communications disciplines that states that a sender transmits a message to receiver. So pretty basic principle, right?
And here's an example of just what that model looks like. So you have the source, or the sender, which will desire to communicate some sort of message and will transmit this message through a channel, which will be the means or medium of transmission. And as a message is being channeled, it becomes susceptible to various dysfunctional factors that interfere with the message, and which is a noise in this case. But the message, of course, then proceeds to the receiver.
So again, just to clarify, the channel is going to be the means or medium of transmission of the message. And the noise is going to be some sort of factor that could alter or affect the message.
So a more typical example would be a granddaughter here, who wants to wish her grandma a happy birthday, who is somewhere on the other end. And she's going to transmit that message by means of a telephone. And the channel here is going to be the telephone cable or wire.
So this channel will be susceptible to noise in the form of some sort of bad line, causing static, or just electrical interference. And it could be various other forms of noise.
Another typical example would be maybe classmates in a classroom. So you have boy A who is trying to transmit a message to boy B. And the channel here is going to be just verbally. Now, in a classroom, you'd be susceptible to noise in the form of ambient sounds from other classmates, that are in turn adding their own sound that could disturb, interfere, or alter the message in some ways. This is almost literal noise in this case.
So that about wraps up our first lesson here. So I'm going to end with our key terms for today. And like I said, today is going to be a good intro to visual communications. And we'll continue to discuss and expand more specific examples and some of the key terms and concepts that we've learned today. The key terms again are "visual communications," "perceptual communications models," "sensory communications models," "transmission models," "source," "channel," and, of course, "noise."
I hope you've all enjoyed our first lesson in visual design and communications pathway. My name is Mario. And I hope to see you next lesson.
