25 guidelines for great visual communication

There’s a good reason why most corporate communications don’t include any images.

“Most communicators were trained in words,” Suzanne Salvo, co-owner of Salvo Photography, told an overflow audience at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in Chicago. But, to be really effective, they need to train themselves in pictures.

“The way we process information is in images,” Salvo said. “People much prefer to receive information in the form of the visual. We believe the information that our eyes give to us much more so than what we read or what we hear.”

Considering that 380 times more images are created each year than were in 1930, you’ve got to do more than just point and shoot to get people’s attention with your images.

“They’d better be good, because now they’re not special anymore,” Salvo said. “Good enough is no longer good enough.”

Same goes for video, she said. In October 2011, people watched 2.1 million years’ worth of video on YouTube.

“If you’re doing video now and you think it’s looking great, there’s no resting on your laurels,” she said.

Salvo offered these tips for being better than “good enough”: