Expand your visual vocabulary

The folks at Elf Design have a great article called The 9 Advantages to Using a Visual Vocabulary in Brand Identity Design. It has some great points that anyone who is developing a new ad campaign for their company should consider. Here's a sampling.

The elements of your visual vocabulary become a graphic language, which takes your viewer deeper into your graphics and materials....

Graphics in a visual vocabulary are a method of communication that's more quickly understood than text alone. A viewer can absorb the meanings of colors, symbols, photos, shapes and even font types much more quickly than by reading text. So, in cases where time is of the essence—when you're marketing to busy people, creating motion graphics such as animations or commercials or designing items that people will quickly pass by, such as car graphics or billboards, this is an important consideration.

The right combination of visual vocabulary elements can also make your materials more eye-catching. When your materials are in competition with others—in a stack of proposals, on a table with other brochures or even a postcard coming out of a crowded mailbox—they'll have a better chance of getting noticed when they are designed with stunning and unique visual vocabulary elements.

Forty percent of viewers better remember visual elements. A visual vocabulary will increase the memorability of your materials as well, since people will have more visual elements to remember in your materials.