Communication Reading

This chapter was all about communication. As a graphic designer, it is important to communicate with others to get our ideas across. I like how this chapter deals with ways to communicate with clients and people you have to work with so that your work can be understood. One important concept of communication that I found was language. Aspelund says that language can be emotional or informational. I think that being emotional is more important when you are talking with a client about a specific project. You want the client to know that what you think is important is what they think is important. Dealing with an emotional language, you can have what the author calls a “point to point relationship”. This means that you can discuss each point of reference and how it relates to the overall design.

Another important factor in communication is the fact that different audiences need different types of communication. This can include where you decided to unveil your project, what type of pencils you use, and how you present your ideas to the client, or your design team. I think that Aspelund does a great job in this chapter of giving us as the designer different ideas of working with different types of people and projects and giving us ways to get views and ideas out to the public.

One of the main parts of communication is presentation. Presentation is how you show others your concept and ideas. Aspelund compares a presentation to being like a performance. The same way an actor gets ready to perform, a designer needs to be ready to make a presentation that will show someone else exactly what they want to do. He says that you have to know your lines, what direction your project is going into, and what is your motivation for the project.

In the end, I think that communication is very important in the art of graphic design. If you can’t get your point across to the people who are buying your product or the people that you are designing something for, then it’s not going to work. I also learned in this chapter that there are a lot of different types of communication and what works for one person probably wont’ work for someone else. You need to be ready to work with all types of personalities and you need to be able to communicate with them as well.