What Is Visual Communications? How Is it Used?

Design is everywhere you look: logos, Web sites, business cards, advertisements, brochures, billboards, product packaging, posters, magazines, books, newspapers, greeting cards, playbills, matchbooks ... the list is virtually endless.

Is “visual communications” just a fancy way of saying “graphic design”? Not really. The old-guard field of graphic design focused on translating the conceptual to the visual using a variety of 2-D media. The emphasis was on creating the form of the message with color, shape, texture and type and using photos, illustrations and more.

Visual communications includes other types of communications beyond the traditional print medium of the old graphic design industry. One example is the design of interactive computer presentations that integrate video, animation, sound, stored images and text.

By its problem-solving nature, visual communications incorporates the rationale behind choosing the message and the medium. It provides the “why” of the message in addition to the “how” to an intended audience for a specific purpose. In other words, it provides the form of graphic design, but also provides the function of why this particular medium (printed material, Web site or other) best suits a particular message.

Career Areas

There are a lot of different jobs and job titles in this field, depending on your particular interest, skills sets and continued education, including:

Job openings requiring Web development and design skills are expanding exponentially, and the technology that is used changes almost weekly. The number of all Internet-related jobs is expected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations in the next decade as more and more companies use the Internet to do business. Emerging technologies lead to more jobs each year.

Earthweb’s 2007 IT Salary Guide lists average national salaries for senior Web developers in 2007 as $71,000 to $102,000, with those figures rising an additional 6 percent in the Dallas metropolitan area. The site lists average salaries for a number of today’s tech jobs, as well as the fastest-growing IT jobs and top certification categories in the country.

America’s Career Infonet and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics offer occupation descriptions and working conditions, as well as projected salaries, for:

Salaries and Projected Job Growth

According to America’s Career Infonet, related occupations offer the following average salaries across the nation: