Chapter 2. Winning in the New Visual Age
ONCE UPON A TIME, visual languages ruled the world, from the haunting animal paintings on cave walls in Lascaux, France, to the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians and Mayans. These days, it looks like we’ve come full circle, with images once again all around us and the new visual languages of infographics and emojis filling our screens.
We’re in the middle of a new visual age, and images of all kinds are competing for our limited attention. We now owe it to ourselves, our ideas, and those we communicate with to not just be consumers of images, but producers as well.
In this chapter, I want to show you why this is so important, and why sketching is everybody’s job.
Words Fail
Imagine for a moment that the only means we had to express ourselves was with words. Spoken and written words, as depicted in Figure 2-1. There would be no paintings, drawings, or visual art of any kind. There’d be no music, no infographics, and no mime artists.1 There’d be no maps, and thus weather reporters wouldn’t have much for us to look at while we listened to them rattle off tide times, barometric pressures, and whatnot. And I hate to say this, but business presentations would be even longer and even more boring, with no charts or stock photos of any kind.
Figure 2-1. She’s ...
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