Visual Communicating: Legibility & Tone of Voice

Visually communicating something to an audience in an effective way all depends on a few key factors. You may have outstanding imagery but how will it be used and is it easy for the audience to understand and interpret? Is the message clear from your choice of images?

As our project was designing a magazine, this lecture was of particular use as I was able to learn and concentrate my research on the legibility of the design, considering the layout and style for that audience, making sure there is a clear typeface and aligned text correctly. This is a key point when designing your articles, are your paragraphing well thought out? Is the title clear and stands out but doesn’t over power the page? Need to take into account the text size, the alignments and the structure of the image to text ratio on the page. Does the content represent the images and vice versa?

What about colour? Colour is a big deal, as certain colours really do not work on a white background and you want to make it look more visually appealing but being careful to not make a mistake with the colour. Some colours could be misleading when it’s matched with an image, images tell a story and the colour of a text caption could spoil the audiences initial thought of the imagery.

It is important to think about where the magazine will be shown, a standard type size of 12 is acceptable for a magazine/essay piece but being shown on a large screen won’t be readable.

Here is an ad campaign for the NHS for stop smoking, this is a simple and effective advertisement. The style is a cloud of smoke coming from the cigarette with the text fitting inside of it and even the font is designed as a smoke effect. The legibility of the graphics, typeface and layout works well for this poster.

What is also essential to visual communicating a written piece is ‘tone of voice’; this can be represented through choice of font ‘LOUD - quiet ’, style of typography, size and colour (for example when filling out forms different sections are highlighted – informative, helpful etc. giving you guidance through just changing the colours)

I looked at another NHS campaign poster but this one has a clearer tone of voice on it. The text is written in a child like hand written font, giving the audience recognition that it is a younger person’s quote and a shocking statement from a child. Giving this stop smoking advertisement the shock factor as its personal elements comes through with composition and typography choices. The small basic font at the bottom of the page shows authority and informative speech. It clearly shows that tone of voice and the legibility choices you make are important on delivering the correct message to the audience.