Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century

By Robert E. Horn

Book Overview

Uh-oh, McLuhan was right. As our information stream meets a confluence of new media, our language has changed accordingly. Stanford scholar Robert E. Horn lays it all out for us in Visual Language,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 189263709X
• ISBN13: 9781892637093
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: MacroVU Press
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.0" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

The missing piece of Information Mapping®

As a trained and active Information Mapping® practitioner I have come to respect Mr. Horn's genius. This book cements my respect and builds upon his impressive accomplishments in the field of verbal (and now visual) communications. The approach in the book, like Information Mapping® itself, takes some getting used to. Moreover, it can produce some visually ugly pages. In fact, I almost discarded the book based on some of the examples within, but discovered that these eyesores actually did communicate concepts and facts. What makes this book important is the equal importance placed on words, images and shapes, and the recipe for integrating them into a highly visual communications medium. It also provided me with some deep insights about the cognitive aspects of shapes, colors and symbols. If you are looking for a book on page layout and design look elsewhere. If you're an Information Mapping® practitioner, this book will nicely dovetail with the principles of information chunking and integrating graphics that are inherent in that method. I have gained much from this book and have already used the techniques to good effect in a few recent projects. It earns 5 stars in my opinion.

A seminal work for the right audience

This is not a book on layout and design, so if you are in that segment you will probably not like this book. The author's intent is to develop a visual approach for conveying information. The approach itself is a combination of pictures and words structured in a format similar to a comic strip or storyboard. This approach has merit, although it breaks many layout and design rules for aesthetics. This probably accounts for the wide chasm that divides the previous reviewers. Regardless of whether you buy into the entire approach the main value of this book lies in the education you will receive in the effective use of shapes and images to convey meaning. Prior to reading this book I used intuition, previous experience and a lot of examples when designing documents that relied heavily on graphics. I came away from this book with the following: (1) a clear idea of how to integrate words, images and shapes to effectively communicate ideas and concepts. (2) Cogitative aspects of certain shapes and forms, singularly or in combination, as metaphors for time, speed and other qualities that you want to impart. (3) How to effectively use space in a diagram to convey information - the chapter on the vocabulary of space, including distance, placement in frames and other spatial techniques was worth the price of the book to me. (4) The ways to develop different diagrams using the same basic information served as an idea catalog for me and has greatly influenced my approach to information visualization.An additional benefit I personally gained from this book is that it provided me with a solid foundation that makes Edward Tufte's beautifully produced and seminal books more understandable. Before reading this book I struggled with Tufte's Envisioning Information, but did not comprehend many of the subtleties. Armed with the knowledge gained from Visual Language I revisited Tufte's book and saw its beauty and genius. This has added the dimension of aesthetics to the way I produce graphics. So, while this book breaks a plethora of rules in page layout and design, and the examples are not visually appealing, it does give an approach for effectively conveying information. If you want to understand how to effectively integrate words, images and shapes to convey highly technical concepts or information you will find some excellent ideas in this book, as well as gain an understanding of how they all fit together on a more fundamental level. I give it five stars for the profound influence it has had on my thinking and recommend it to those of us who are not graphic artists.

Poetry for visual thinkers

Robert Horn is the Samuel Johnson and the William Shakespeare of visual literacy. He teaches us the rhetoric, grammar, and syntax and then gives us example upon example of visual wisdom. I felt like a child learning a new language; eager for every fresh term, charmed by each surprising relationship.The literati and digerati are now joined by the visulati - visual language thinkers who have mastered the principles of visual literacy.Playful & scholarly, innovative & practical, insightful & comprehensive, informative & provocative, historical & forward-looking -- I give Horn's book on Visual Language five twinkling red-yellow-green-blue-purple stars.

A uniquely useful and challenging learning adventure

Visual language, combining text and images, has been around for a long time -- but only in the last two decades, with the rise of desktop publishing and design, has it become commonly accessible. Horn, a pioneer in the field (and inventor of Information Mapping), wants us to acknowledge the power inherent in this melange.To communicate his case, Horn uses visual language. This makes the book twice as interesting: you, the reader, learn about visual language as you experience it. This book is full of discoveries and demonstrations. Begin it on a lazy weekend and you may not want to stop until you're done.It's challenging that Horn uses clipart throughout, to make the point that one need not be an artist to write visual language. That may be so; but clipart, despite the ingenuity of its authors, has limitations, especially conceptual banality. Horn is a master; others of us might have more difficulty treating complex issues with visual language based on clipart.No matter. One can easily envision a more subtle and sublime form of visual communication using more eloquent graphics. VISUAL LANGUAGE remains fun and informative from beginning to end. This book is both a text and a how-to. Read and apply it well!