- An idea succeeds when the audience understands it
and embraces it.
Too often, clients tell me that their audience is everybody.
That's a wide net,
and I do my best to narrow it down.
Once we've reached consensus on who we are speaking to,
I find icons to be especially potent
as a communication tool.
They speak clearly to specific groups
and have resonance when understood.
The Montreal Olympics in 1976
followed tragedy and political violence
at the 1972 Olympics.
Raymond Bellemare decided to communicate
the peaceful and nonpolitical nature of the Olympics
with iconography.
To achieve this,
Bellemare used the symbol of a denim jacket
that spoke to youth culture at the time,
and a series of buttons, each with a unique icon.
It's not important to know what every icon represents.
What's important is that the viewer
have a connection to the icons
that he or she recognizes as part of their world.
Modifying recognizable icons can provoke an audience.
For example, on a poster for a presentation
of American influences in Germany,
I used the forms of the American flag,
but I changed the red, white, and blue
to Germany's flag colors.
The result is a disturbing combination for both cultures,
regardless of political point of view.
Most people will look at this poster by Paul Rand
and decipher the message as IBM.
But for employees at IBM,
the forms have a special significance.
The M is part of the IBM logo,
the bee uses the same stripe forms
and signifies community and hard work,
and the eye is about vision.
Like binary numbers, zero and one,
there are only two shapes here,
rectangles and circles.
"War and Peace" is a literary classic by Leo Tolstoy.
The plot is complex and very, very long.
The assignment to design a poster
to communicate the television program based on the novel
must have been daunting at best.
While the solution is blunt and to the point,
it presumes the viewer already
has an understanding of the book.
A dove of peace sits on a grouping of cannonballs,
two good icons to communicate the title.
Now, here is the brilliance of the solution.
The viewer does all the work here
with the gestural approach.
The cannonballs are not actually cannonballs.
They are painted dots.
And doves are not blue, they are white.
But we, as the viewers, ignore that fact
and are more than willing
to accept the blue shape as a dove.
Consider if the solution were photographed.
We would be presented with a literal image
that begged questions such as,
how did they get that dove to stand there?
Using icons as a communication device can be pointed
and reach the viewer with surgical precision.
If you understand the audience and their culture,
use the icons they recognize,
the meaning may be lost on a larger group,
but will be extremely resonant
to the people you want to reach.