The importance of visual grammar
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According to Gestalt, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts“. If we accept the mantra of the German school, we are compelled to accept that the aesthetic construction contains a grammar of its own, some basic elements that in their conjunction form a whole which is its own entity, but one which is dissolvable and flexible.
The perception of visual language
In the linguistic meaning of the term “grammar”, we find the terms, rules and regulations for the efficient construction of a language. When considering the visual, this meaning is enriched because visual language is multifaceted and is not only based on oral or written communication; therefore, visual grammar has a more complex significance.
For us, the term process is the key. Unlike other communication systems, visual communication involves a process of perception that plays a fundamental role in effective communication, the way we confront, perceive and process an aesthetic construct is the very basis of visual language, hence the importance of those mental processes that underlie the visual system and that are composed in the DNA of this visual grammar.
Human beings have always had a need for proportion and harmony, not only to contemplate it as mere spectators but to understand it, to discover the rules that make up this harmonious beauty.
The early Greek philosophers were already discussing harmonic forms and proportions and deified the abstract objects that today form the basis of the “objectual” conception of visual grammar: the line, the point, the surface, the dimension. But perhaps the most intentional approach to the study of visual grammar as a discipline in its own right did not take place until the early years of the 20th century, within the Bauhaus school: Vasily Kandisky and Laszlo Moholy, who understood the need to create their own grammar.
In particular, Kandinsky argued that “like the words of language, the plastic elements must be recognised and defined. And as in grammar, the laws of construction must be established. In painting, the process of composition responds to grammar.”
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Visual grammar has been the subject of intense study during the 20th century. We must not forget that the 20th century is the century when the world became an image of itself: photography, TV, advertising, internet… Susan Sontag defined this modern society as “a society devoid of morals that brutalises sensibility and dulls the capacity of most people to do good but makes available to a minority the consumption of an astonishing range of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures.”
This is why authors such as Rudolf Arnheim, Fabris Germani, Justo Villafañe, Gyorgy Kepes, Herbert Read and many others have devoted themselves to the study of this grammar which underlies every aesthetic construction and its implication in the development of visual society.
The key elements of visual grammar
From our experience in design, one of the most interesting books to read to explore the visual aspect of grammatical dissection (and a book we recommend to any designer to refresh their understanding of those terms and relationships that we sometimes take for granted) is “Visual Grammar” by Christian Leborg. In it, the author proposes, through a mixture of treatise and visual dictionary, the basic elements that make up a visual grammar such as abstract objects (point, line, dimensions…), concrete objects (shape, size, colour…) and the structures that contain the relationship between these objects (gradation, distribution…).
When it comes to understanding the construction of this visual grammar, it is interesting, to know the processes and relationships with which these structures interact, such as attraction, symmetry, balance, weight, position, etc. This publication is undoubtedly a necessary insight into how to handle visual language from a technical and formal point of view.
We need to handle this language because the formal syntax is how we communicate efficiently with our customer through our aesthetic work. It is, in fact, the basis for building our relationship. There is a desire to understand a form of communication that is possibly one of the characteristics of today’s society and we must respond to this need. Just as oral or written language is a communication resource that we have acquired naturally and has undergone an evolution from its original form, the same evolution must take place in the whole process of construction of visual objects. For this, knowledge of the syntax and the visual grammar is central and necessary.
In today’s society, each and every one of us is a voracious consumer of visual messages. That is why we, as creators of these messages, have the responsibility to understand and apply the basic elements of visual language in order to establish an authentic, critical, efficient and productive dialogue with our consumers. As we have seen, any language is in constant movement and our syntax must be too, adapting and growing according to the needs of this mass of consumers eager for new visual stimuli.
Genetsis Group
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