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.