Visual Literacy: A Universal Way to Better Communicate Ideas

Instructional designers often need help with explaining design concepts to stakeholders. In turn, stakeholder ideas are only sometimes clearly defined. In crafting learning experiences to meet the learning objectives, expectations often need to be more aligned when presented to stakeholders. The result is more time in a series of review cycles which delays development and jeopardizes non-accounted-for project time. But what if you had visual literacy skills and a visual thinking process so that you could manage expectations early with a universal way of communicating ideas?

Visual thinking begins with exploring concepts on how to communicate ideas better and then transform those ideas into a visual language. Visual literacy is what binds visual thinking to that output. In this workshop, I will teach you a visual thinking process rooted in the Visual Language Theory, where you will learn how to communicate a better understanding of visual literacy skills. In this workshop, you will learn fundamental techniques to extract your and your stakeholder’s ideas into a universal visual language to communicate your message. You will learn how to converge different perceptions of an idea into a shared understanding that saves project time and unnecessary design changes later in a project. Regardless of your background or experience, you will learn that the fundamental grammar of the visual language has a similar grammatical structure to the written language. By the end of this workshop, you will have a new set of skills and tools to communicate any idea visually.