The power of images

Paula Bronstein. Afghanistan, 2015 (http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/confronting-struggle-afghanistans-war-widows).

Visual storytelling is something that goes back to early humans days. Visuals help us tell our stories quickly with impact and emotion. But why is that? Basically because we don’t see words as letters. We see them as pictures.

Images are stories, always implying more than their parts, always in process. Because vision developed before verbal language, images are a natural part of our primal sense of being.

Neurologically all images are by nature "gestalts" (German for shapes, forms). They are made up of fragments of visual experience that our perception processes and coordinates into "pictures in our head". We match up these fragments to our library of known images from the past and in milliseconds we read a sentence. So reading text is highly heavy on our brains. While seeing images directly speaks to our very core library of knowledge and experience.

Images and symbols we evoke while talking belong to our visual experience, the logic of our perception feeds the logic of our language. They are essentially inseparable. In other words, we are built to use visual language to express ourselves fully and meaningfully. As a result, text presentations are simply not very effective for transferring information. 

Did you know that if information is presented orally, we remember about 10% three days later. However, if a picture is added in, that figure goes up to 65%? We just don’t remember words. What was the last series of words on a screen you remember from a presentation? Exactly. Sure there may be exceptions and one big word or short sentence on a black background can be impactful, but that is still closer to an image than a sequence of sentences.

In sum, few takeaways:

Powerful visuals evoke deep emotions and result in a deeper engagement of the audience with your content. It needs to be the right visuals though: relevant to your topic and to your audience. That’s why when preparing a visual narrative, either a presentation or a report or infographic, you need to start by identifying your audience's passion and interests and become a master at speaking directly to their emotions. Development writing is about telling a story and creating a closer connection to your audience, and powerful visuals, whether they’re still images or video, make that much easier and more effective.

Four key rules for powerful visuals:
Use authentic visuals
Be culturally relevant to your audience
Use visuals that reflect the human experience
Use visual storytelling tools like archetypal characters

We will talk more in depth about storytelling tools and archetypal characters in future posts.