"I love the joy of communicating with a language that is both totally absurd and universal. Sometimes there are situations in life that can only ever be expressed by a pile of poo with a smiling face on it." Harriet Henry, voice of a generation. But that's the thing isn't it, that no matter what language you speak you can appreciate the meaning of an image? Emojis may be a trivial example, but they're a relevant one when thinking about how much the world is employing a new visual dictionary. What pictures you put out there say a lot about who you are as a person.
When Facebook brought in the cover photo, a lot of people saw it as a chance to express themselves, make a statement, promote events with an advertising banner or just put lots of fluffy rainbow animals on their profile. It's always been cool to be creative and those who actually physically make and create are hailed as a kind of 21st century ideal, only now it's easy as pi for the artistically inept to appear creative too. Everyone can edit their own mediocre photography, or simply create a strong statement through the imagery they adopt from a professional. The language of visual can, in this sense, be a deceitful and limited one. Instagram is huge, Pinterest too, and blogs have become perhaps even more widely read than magazines. Everyone panicked that the digital age would be the end of print but beautiful editorials are still alive and kicking and what coffee table books you lay out in your sitting room still state your creative inclinations as much as the blogs you follow. Blogs become books, books become blogs; the shift is that print can spread (excuse the pun) a lot faster, be shared quicker and the boundaries of the page are quite literally being stretched.
Take Because Magazine, an innovative new publication that arrives in your hands in print form and then requires the reader to use the Fashion Scan app to bring its pages to life. You simply hold your smart phone over the page, and a video will pop up, or some commentary from the article's editor. You can shop the products in the shoots directly from your phone, and even use the app to scan any fashion ads or billboards to discover extra content. Is this the future of print? If it is I must say I could come around. As editor-in-chief Caroline Issa says, the worlds of print and digital shouldn't be in a tug of war, we shouldn't feel one is more intellectual than the other. They can be "in one package" that "optimises what each medium can offer us."
The world of business if getting in on this too. In a similar way, brands are using scanning apps to enhance their marketing and advertising campaigns. No longer is a market researcher with a clipboard the only way to gain insight. Instead of having to create powerful advertising images from data, it can now all begin from an image. In his article for the Times, James Dean talks about the US company Ditto Labs, which has developed image recognition software to pick up logos and brand names in people's social media snaps. The technology allows marketeers to assess the sentiment or emotion attached to their brand through analysing the actions and facial expressions captured alongside it in a photo. One amusing stat is that 13% of people wearing visible Adidas logos were also interested in Justin Bieber. Aww, the young and chavvy youth of today.
This technology all sounds very clever and futuristic. It also seems intrusive if it's targeting tweeny boppers. On the other hand, I can't help admitting that if we are willing to express and present ourselves in the medium of surface imagery, show off the latest brand to our followers and filter ourselves into a better picture, then perhaps we cannot complain if we are also judged by it personally and commercially. Visual language is all at once a brilliant window of creative opportunity and a form of self-imposed social labelling. The question is, do you speak visual? And if you don't, do you want to? Some couldn't care less, some have a slight flare for it, some manipulate it and some people are downright fluent. However else you choose to express yourself, you can't deny you understand visual power, because branding is inescapable...unless you live in outer Mongolia without wifi.
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When Facebook brought in the cover photo, a lot of people saw it as a chance to express themselves, make a statement, promote events with an advertising banner or just put lots of fluffy rainbow animals on their profile. It's always been cool to be creative and those who actually physically make and create are hailed as a kind of 21st century ideal, only now it's easy as pi for the artistically inept to appear creative too. Everyone can edit their own mediocre photography, or simply create a strong statement through the imagery they adopt from a professional. The language of visual can, in this sense, be a deceitful and limited one. Instagram is huge, Pinterest too, and blogs have become perhaps even more widely read than magazines. Everyone panicked that the digital age would be the end of print but beautiful editorials are still alive and kicking and what coffee table books you lay out in your sitting room still state your creative inclinations as much as the blogs you follow. Blogs become books, books become blogs; the shift is that print can spread (excuse the pun) a lot faster, be shared quicker and the boundaries of the page are quite literally being stretched.
Take Because Magazine, an innovative new publication that arrives in your hands in print form and then requires the reader to use the Fashion Scan app to bring its pages to life. You simply hold your smart phone over the page, and a video will pop up, or some commentary from the article's editor. You can shop the products in the shoots directly from your phone, and even use the app to scan any fashion ads or billboards to discover extra content. Is this the future of print? If it is I must say I could come around. As editor-in-chief Caroline Issa says, the worlds of print and digital shouldn't be in a tug of war, we shouldn't feel one is more intellectual than the other. They can be "in one package" that "optimises what each medium can offer us."
The world of business if getting in on this too. In a similar way, brands are using scanning apps to enhance their marketing and advertising campaigns. No longer is a market researcher with a clipboard the only way to gain insight. Instead of having to create powerful advertising images from data, it can now all begin from an image. In his article for the Times, James Dean talks about the US company Ditto Labs, which has developed image recognition software to pick up logos and brand names in people's social media snaps. The technology allows marketeers to assess the sentiment or emotion attached to their brand through analysing the actions and facial expressions captured alongside it in a photo. One amusing stat is that 13% of people wearing visible Adidas logos were also interested in Justin Bieber. Aww, the young and chavvy youth of today.
This technology all sounds very clever and futuristic. It also seems intrusive if it's targeting tweeny boppers. On the other hand, I can't help admitting that if we are willing to express and present ourselves in the medium of surface imagery, show off the latest brand to our followers and filter ourselves into a better picture, then perhaps we cannot complain if we are also judged by it personally and commercially. Visual language is all at once a brilliant window of creative opportunity and a form of self-imposed social labelling. The question is, do you speak visual? And if you don't, do you want to? Some couldn't care less, some have a slight flare for it, some manipulate it and some people are downright fluent. However else you choose to express yourself, you can't deny you understand visual power, because branding is inescapable...unless you live in outer Mongolia without wifi.
Picture 1 - The Writing
Picture 2 - My recently used emojis. Read into it what you will.
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