What cartoons can teach us about information delivery

A picture says more than a thousand words, right? Managers drown in pages of numeric reports. But as John Medina, author of the famous book ‘Brain Rules’ clearly pointed out: “Vision trumps all other senses“. In other words: we are much better at absorbing information through visuals than we are at reading numbers and letters.

To see how effective visuals can be at delivering complex information we just have to look at something that we are all surrounded by: Cartoons. They are in newspapers, they are on websites, they show up on twitter. Cartoons are drawings. A single picture that tells a humorous or critical story. Once you look at them carefully you will notice how deep and smart they can be: They tell a thoughtful joke or story in a single picture.

Talk about the power of visualization! Remember the scandal about the Danish cartoonist a few years ago? A single picture set a huge scandal in motion. To convey the same message, a writer would have to fill a lot of pages. And those pages wouldn’t be all that powerful.

To learn more about cartoons I ended up watching this short Ted presentation by Patrick Chappatte. It is quite entertaining and it highlights the power of visualization. We should all strive to learn something from this. Shouldn’t we all use more visuals in our daily lives? Should we toss those endless 2-dimensional reports and replace them with good, solid visuals that tell a clear story? You know my answer.

 


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