1. Abstraction and Representation
- An image might mostly be representational or mostly abstract, but it always will be a mixture of the two. Abstract images communicate ideas that are grounded in the human experience.
2. Image Modes and Mediation
- A designer might choose to represent an idea by using photographs, illustrations, or a hybrid manipulated photographs or drawn images in combination.
3. Semiology and Stylization
- A designer might often need to represent ideas in a stylized way, selecting the most important elements form a subject and arranging them in as concise and simplified a message as possible.
4. Illustration
- The choice of illustration over photography opens up tremendous possibility for transmitting information.
5. Drawing and Painting
- The directness of hand-generated images is universally appealing, the designer taps into a viewer’s own sense of creativity and connects on an extremely personal level.
6. The Medium Is a Message
- Every drawing and painting tool makes characteristic marks and affords a designer a specific kind of visual language. The language of the tool has a powerful effect on an illustration’s communicative value, not just on its visual qualities relative to other elements in a design solution.
7. Graphic Translation
- Graphic translation combines some attributes of both icon and symbol. It depicts subjects in a literal way, like an icon, but also in a self-consciously abstract way that takes on symbolic qualities.
8. Collage: Old and New
- Assembling graphic elements in a free pictorial composition, called “collage”, is a relatively recent development in illustration. It derives from the evolution of representation in fine art form depicting a strictly singular view-point through the construction of multiple viewpoints.
9. Photography
- Realism and directness allow a viewer to enter the image and process it very quickly, rather than get distracted by abstract pictorial issues such as texture, medium, and composition.
10. Narrative Interplay
- Putting photographs together increases their semantic power and creates narrative, or storytelling; the instant two images can be compared, whether juxtaposed or arranged in sequence, a viewer will try to establish meaningful connections between them.