VizThink 08: Bob Horn Interview

by January 28, 2008

Nancy Duarte & Cliff Atkinson, two leading voices in presentation design principles, interviewed Bob Horn author of Visual Language at the opening session of VizThink 2008.

  • Visual Language is an international auxiliary language. It is a supplement to natural language and an integration of words and images.
  • Words help visuals communicate more clearly.
  • Evolution gave us a great way of producing and ingesting audio information and a good way of absorbing visual information. However, we do not have a good mechanism for producing visual information.
  • isual Language provides ways to keep a strategic context in front of us as we go about detailed decision making. We can maintain context through visual murals.
  • Murals are pattern-inviting artifacts. After a brief introduction to a mural, people can get into the details. Murals should invite people to form their own ideas and relationships.
  • We don’t yet have a global graphic library because there is no business plan for it.
  • Different sizes of visual artifacts are for different audiences in different contexts: icon, concept diagram, information visualization, and mural.
  • We train the separation of words and visuals out of our children. They have an instinct to do both.