A picture paints what?
Scoring a massive 89% on Legend’s Twaddleometer, and having heard it quoted again twice this week, I give you the infamous nonsense:
“A picture paints a thousand words”
Frankly, I wouldn’t give this sort of unthinking trivia page-space if it were not for the fact that otherwise sensible people actually make decisions on its shaky foundations. We all know it is nonsense, but it persists perhaps because you can fill a page easier with an image than to really have to think about what you are saying. I don’t understand how anyone who has used an image library to find a picture that expresses an idea can still think this way. Type in something like ‘inspiration’ and you will get a hundred versions of a couple of threadbare cliches, a hundred light bulbs and a sinking feeling in your stomach… this is going to take some time!
By now we should all know that the phrase was invented by an ad man (Fred R Barnard, reputedly) trying to sell the use of imagery to clients at a time when press ads in particular often came in at a couple of thousand words. He admitted, later, that he had invented the claim that this was an ancient oriental proverb and that he had never blamed it directly on Confucius. Just as well, perhaps.
It is interesting to note that it is the words, not an image, that have survived. It is an idea that caught on and ideas often have very long legs and little sense of direction, so they often appear later where they have no business being. Ideas also reproduce very quickly. They have children and grandchildren within hours, it seems. Ideas are gregarious little things, they clump together, form associations, create patterns, it matters little to uncritical minds that these connections might be spurious. So a trend began in advertising; imagery did something, and within five years it became dominant across press advertising. The main reason this worked was because it was an idea whose time had come, commercial television had already hammered home that an animated image with a tricksy little slogan or simple claim was all that was needed to influence behaviour.
This then fed into our Art Schools, ways of approaching communication changed. Visual shorthand became everything, symbolism began to matter more than semiotics, iconography replaced meaning. Visual literacy began to displace verbal and designers began to follow a trend that remains today, the tendency to treat text as if it were just the grey stuff that punctuates the graphics. The notion of the typographer as the person who through visual sensitivity and understanding of the form, ductus and rhythm and pace of his design could actually affect the way in which the text was experienced and understood, all this faded. It is not easy, today, to find a designer with sufficient enjoyment of words, let alone literacy, to treat them with respect. By implication, of course, this means that little respect is shown for the client or his reasons for commissioning this work in the first place. Bad habits die hardest of all.
