The case for improving your visual creation skills #design #technology #transliteracy

It is becoming more important to know how to create original images, videos, and other visual content. You need transliteracy skills.

20060410 (2) (Photo credit: nikontino)

In the same way that it has traditionally been important to know how to read, write and perform arithmetic as a basic skill set of communication, it has become increasingly important for people to create their own images, video, and other graphics to communicate their particular message effectively. It’s almost as though people only recently realized their visual preferences, maybe as a reaction to the emergence of visually motivated social networks like Pinterest, a place for people to curate, share, and collect images with verbal content becoming secondary.

A more visual web of content requires new skills.

A screenshot of the GIMP 2.2.8 raster graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As we move towards more digital interactions, and enjoy more visual web content from producers as a first introduction to their messages, we can see that they are creating a digital trail for themselves. Other people then find and interpret what they are about through quick visual assessments. If you look at my Pinterest boards, you will quickly get a sense of what I am about, because the cursory glance at a series of images does not carry the threshold of understanding that reading text does. We must slow down and engage our verbal brain to interpret the letterforms, then the words, then the combination of words to make meaning. With images, we need only recognize the items in the image to begin interpretation. We want to be able to leave our own visual trail, one with interesting, insightful, and communicative images, videos, and graphics that tell our story. If you do not know how to edit a photograph, make cuts, titles, and transitions in video and audio, or create a reasonable graphic, you will become more reliant on others to produce, edit, or change content for you. In the same way that you would not have to rely on someone else to create your word processed documents for you, you do not want to rely on someone else for mediating your visual content.

You can learn how to make great images and videos.

There are fantastic free tools and resources to begin to learn how to use these toolkits in the same way that you learned how to use browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, and operating systems. If you learned by spending time in the applications, the same will likely be true for visual applications. If you learned by reading a book, you may want to try the same for these applications. In order to learn Inkscape, an open source illustration application like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator, by book, I strongly suggest The Book of Inkscape, by Dimitry Kosonov. You likely learned word processing and other applications because a need arose for you to become familiar with them to do schoolwork, business, or to communicate with others. A new need has emerged in digital transliteracy: for people to communicate in person, on paper, on-screen, in images, in video, in voice, and in graphics.

You can be your own graphic designer, video producer, or photographer with the skills to support you.

English: An infographic illustrating and comparing the popularity of different geosocial networking services (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With newly acquired video editing, image manipulation, and other visual media skills, you can begin to tell new stories that move people differently than a page or a voice can, take part in the remixed web, leave your creations waiting to be found and enjoyed, and have a kind of digital presence that engages, sticks with visual learners, and promotes you differently than text can because of the very nature of the media.

I’d like to help you to gain these skills!

Contact me at lemasney@gmail.com or 609-553-9498 to talk about how we can begin to acquire these skills for your organization, service, or product. Let’s do something great together!