VISUAL SUPERIORITY

Have you ever thought about how lucky you are to be able to utilize and operate within the world of visual shapes, rather than rely instead on verbal language?  The immense richness of our visual world allows us the unparalleled capacity to be able to manipulate shapes and objects that are two and three dimensional.  This infinite variety of structures certainly is of far greater variation than verbal language.

Plus, verbal language has a one dimensional linear sequence, which makes it far less fun than visual shapes.  For us, on the other hand, our shapes overlap and interact in a holistic manner.   And the more transparently you draw, the more that this holism occurs.

In the history of language, our first words or verbal utterances were directly related to a perceptual experience or event.  Nobody knows what the first verbal constructs were given the lack of empirical evidence.  Yet most are in agreement that the first words would have been in direct relation to things that we can directly perceive: food, or pain, gestures, sounds, etc.  In other words if we saw something, like a tree, then we likely developed an utterance for that.

Our use of words has evolved to the point that we forget the direct link to perception.  Yet it can be argued that verbal human thinking cannot go beyond what is perceivable in the sensory world.

Or to think about this another way, we employ new words when we have a new visual phenomenon.  We need new words to help categorize that which is perceivable.  Sometimes when you do a drawing, you really don’t have the words to describe what you drew.  So the visual image comes first, and then our language struggles to keep up.

If this understanding is correct, then this places the visual world that we operate in to be absolutely superior to the lingual world.  We always knew as designers and visual thinkers that we were superior.  Now we have a logical argument as to why.