Killer Visual Strategies

Engage Any Audience, Improve Comprehension, and Get Amazing Results Using Visual Communication

Amy Balliett

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119680260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Comunicazione aziendale
• Index: Business

Discover the foundation, power, and necessity of visual communication with this essential guide

Visual communication has changed. It's gone from being an optional medium for relaying information to an important method for building connections and increasing understanding. We now use visual storytelling to help us establish and strengthen relationships, engage distracted audiences, and bring clarity to complexity. Killer Visual Strategies examines how visual communication has transformed how brands connect with their customers and colleagues alike. It looks at the growing audience demand for quality visual content and how organizations must meet this demand or risk being left behind.

Killer Visual Strategies traces the history of visual communication and explores why it now plays an integral role in our daily lives. As Amy Balliett tells the story of this evolving medium, she naturally incorporates visuals, such as timelines and data visualizations throughout. In addition to providing actionable rules to follow for creating high-impact visual content, Balliett also explores the latest trends, including visual search, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). Then, she looks forward to what lies ahead in this dynamic field. The book's topics can benefit readers in a range of professions where visual content is now vital to sharing a message.

• Learn best practices for visual communication
• Gain inspiration from countless visual examples
• Stay on top of the latest trends in visual communication
• Understand visual communication for marketing, sales, design, HR, and more

Killer Visual Strategies provides a clearer picture of the evolution of visual communication as a fundamental part of how a story is told.

PART ONE:
VISUAL CONTENT IS KING

Figure p1.1

Source: Demand Gen Report.

What fuels widespread consumer demand? Is it driven by environmental factors such as trends and new platforms, or by a subconscious and innate need for the end product?

We live in a world where technological advancements have drastically altered consumer expectations, but it would be risky to ignore how our natural expectations have informed the evolution of these technologies. The power and influence of visual content today offers a perfect example of how these forces work in tandem: as a result of modern platforms in combination with our own fundamental instincts, we are driven to communicate visually more than ever before.

Is the rise of today's visual communication era guided primarily by our surroundings and learned actions, or is it fueled by a set of inherent behaviors? In the chapters that follow, you'll learn about the historical, environmental, and inherent factors contributing to our visual communication–driven world.

In the pages that follow, we'll learn how the demand for visual content grew in tandem with the emergence of new technologies and new ways to connect. Then we'll explore how both our nurtured and natural inclinations have pushed us toward a visually inclined world.

Understanding how nature and nurture work together to engage viewers will not only prove why visual content is truly king when combined with an understanding of perceived quality in design, it will provide you with a universal set of motivators to apply to any audience.

CHAPTER 1
ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES AND THE RISE OF VISUAL CONTENT

"Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting."

—Bill Gates “Content Is King," (1996)

In 1996, with the dot-com boom in its infancy, Bill Gates published an essay on Microsoft's website that delivered a game-changing prediction for the future of the internet. In that essay, he surmised that “societies will see intense competition—and ample failure as well as success—in all categories of popular content—not just software and news, but also games, entertainment, sports programming, directories, classified advertising, and on-line communities devoted to major interests.”

Entitled “Content Is King,” this short, yet poignant essay quickly entered the vernacular of brand leaders and marketers looking to capitalize on an exciting new technology called the World Wide Web. Organizations everywhere saw the internet as a new frontier of possibilities, but many were equally apprehensive about the future it held. With his essay, Gates was offering a guiding light: a controllable solution for tackling the unknown. Simply put, to find success online, a brand would simply need to focus its efforts on creating great content.

Of course, anything that seems simple in theory is often more complex in practice. In the world of content, this was and still is quite true.

At the time, the general user would connect to the internet using a dial-up modem and consumer-friendly tools such as Netscape Navigator, AOL, and Prodigy. All of these controlled access to content by leading with their own carefully curated experiences first. There were only so many points of entry for logging on to the internet. Meanwhile, the big players online were not time-tested brands; instead, they were new names that had centered their business around chat rooms and connecting people to each other, rather than to information.

What defined great content was still up for debate, and would be for many years to follow. Advancements in technology would continue to shift what was possible, but in 1996, most content had to be text-based in order to load quickly and remain consumable.

Gates acknowledged this while also predicting future demands as technology improved. In a key takeaway, he noted that “if people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.”

Surprisingly, he saw one of the largest barriers to success as the computer screen itself. As with most new technologies entering the market, audiences were wary and set in their ways. Information was consumed in print, not in a digital format. To change consumer habits and ensure they would “put up with turning on a computer” (italics mine), brands would have to offer creative and wholly unique ways to consume content.

In the years that followed, the mantra that “content is king” would come to define how brands connected with customers online. As demand grew, the need to bring order to chaos drove further innovation.

The concept of blogging saw refinement with sites like OpenDiary (1998), LiveJournal (1999), and Blogger (1999). Suddenly, anyone could share their stories online without a knowledge of code.

The explosion of online content would fuel the foundation of Google, a game-changing search algorithm created by two Stanford University students trying to build a better mousetrap than the Ask Jeeveses and Yahoos of the world.

The internet would set the stage for the rise and fall of myriad companies trying to win the attention of consumers around the world, but Gates's prediction continued to ring true: those that centered their business around accessing, consuming, or sharing content were the ones that remained after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s.

---

Key Takeaway In the early days of the internet, digital content was restricted by technology. Brand marketers had to rely on text because high-resolution visual media wouldn't load fast enough for viewers. Connecting with audiences by leading with text worked because there were no alternatives, not because it was audiences' preferred medium.

---

ENTER A NEW MILLENNIUM AND THE RISING DEMAND FOR VISUAL CONTENT

Despite the trepidation of many brands reeling from the dot-com bust, the technological innovations that came out of the first decade of the new millennium ignited a content revolution. Sites such as SixDegrees.com and LiveJournal had already introduced the world to the concept of social networking, but Friendster's launch in 2002 combined all the right ingredients to fuel widespread consumer adoption of this concept.

Myspace, LinkedIn, and numerous other players entered the space shortly after, and the social media arms race began. Each site worked to differentiate itself. LinkedIn focused on remaining niche and topical, centering its branding and content around career connections and mobility. Myspace and Friendster, on the other hand, hoped to cast a far wider net.

Both channels strove to deliver the best user experience for eager audiences hoping to find a home for their online personalities. Popular features tapped in to user vanity, offering the ability to see who viewed your profile or sort a friends list by top friends.

The opportunity to express oneself through design was one of the greatest draws of Friendster and Myspace. Users would spend hours picking the best wallpaper background or choosing their preferred fonts and colors. Eager upstarts jumped at the opportunity to make this customization process even easier and centered their businesses around the two platforms. Anyone looking to show off a new style could purchase wallpapers online or pay for bespoke designs from a variety of DIY and white-glove services.

In tandem with the rise of social media, the ability to create multimedia content became easier than ever before. Film was on the move to digital,...