Cavemen to Admen, how did graphics make it so far?

I hate people who are really into visual arts and communications. I hate them. I hate them for having the ability to communicate far more in much less time and I hate it more because I can’t do it with my words.

Words are difficult, painful modes of expression that connect with a reader after a really long time. You have to walk people down a premise, and then show them a conflict, and finally give a resolution. Your stories take longer, your drop out rate is high, people call you boring, life is hard.

Of course they have their pros. Writing is fundamental to almost all other media. The quintessential way of telling stories that is free of constraints. But on the other hand, writers miss that beautiful instant gratification that visual art gets.

And while I was thinking hard on it, I started to wonder about everything that the visual arts have been since a while now. I love it when my stuff is easy to grab, and pretty to look at. The benefits of good design can never be understated and especially so with the things that you use everyday. And while I am no expert on product design or visual communication, I know a bad decision when I see one.

But this isn’t about the bad decisions. It’s about the right ones that stand out. That super easy to surf through online form, that car seat so comfortable, it hugs you from behind, those earbuds so awesome, nothing has felt more comfortable, great design and smart creations are all around us and they stand out so hard, they almost blend in.

A friend of mine used to say, good design is like a great spouse, the right one and you’ll hardly ever notice how lucky you are unless someone tells you, but the bad one and you know you’re fucked even before getting there.

And that’s true for all forms of innovation and creation. They get out of the way and let you do things, consume information, and process it to give feedback. But the funny thing about graphics, is that they are somehow too longstanding in human history.

Cavemen painted on the walls in a primitive form of pictionary I guess. Art that depicted the ways of life, the things that they had, or maybe wished for. And we evolved from there, down to the print revolution where typefaces started taking over the world of literature. The ability to change the mood of what is being said by using a different typeface, the ability to cram more text into limited space by using italics, was all a visual revelation. And beautiful type has dominated our life ever since.

The right composition, the right colors, and the right words together form a multi-billion dollar industry today and it’s here to stay. It isn’t even funny to know how much of our ideas of the world are shaped by what we see. It is frightening to look at how blinded we could be by the right (or wrong) visuals. And it has been so since forever.

Normally, a medium would exhaust itself over time. It’s ability to exploit human senses and to sway them one way or the other should be limited. Things get outdated. But the ability of visuals to fool us, remains. And that’s what moves me.

I don’t have an answer to this. I apologise if this comes off as an anticlimax but I genuinely don’t. Of course there is the getaway argument that it appeals to our fundamental sense and that evolutionarily, we have come to realise that visuals are the most detailed and accurate representations of the environment around us which leads us to be instinctively dependant on them. But this self awareness should’ve led us to create means of thwarting miscommunication. Unfortunately, that hasn’t really happened.

There are few things in this world that I love more than a pretty typeface and I have tried long and hard to look for an the right reason why it happens. I can’t find one. But there is one thing that I do know, and it is that visuals control creepily copious amounts of what we think about the things that we look at.