C'est vendredi

Ola amigos y amigas.

It's foreign language Friday. Well, not really, but let's pretend.

I'm thinking about language a lot these days. Being concise is important, and I come from an academic writing background which doesn't exactly translate into pithy ad copy as easily as you might think. There aren't many fifty-dollar words in your average radio spot or print ad. You have to be able to convey a message in just a few words that will reach a lot of people. And of course, the language you use needs to be particular to your target demographic.

It's a lot like being in ethno-linguistics, except that it's market-based. A sentence aimed at teenage girls likely won't resonate with seniors because their cultural contexts are so different. There's a lot of room for play in writing ads, especially with such a talented graphic designer as Cassie.

There's a marriage of text and image that goes into designing communications... even radio spots or picture-only print ads. Image and text evoke each other, and sometimes they overlap and become one another, so "marriage" is actually a very romantic way to think of communication design.

Consider Douglas Coupland's sculpture "Generation X", made of paper and magnolia branch in 2004. This is one of my all-time favourite pieces by one of my all-time favourite sculptor/writers. The author himself masticated (ie.: chewed) his novel and formed it into a wasp's nest around a section of tree branch.

What the what? Something Coupland once told me (yes, personally) is that he wasn't a novelist. He creates, he says, sculptures of books. That statement started me rethinking the way I imagine the meaning of words and how they exist in our lives. New media has changed many things: not the least of which is prevalence of the image above the word and a shift in something called (in the academy, at any rate) visual culture. Our culture is almost entirely visual now. We consume more with our eyes that with any other sense organ, even though our eyesight isn't that great as a species. At one point the oral (or the aural) was the primary form of communication, but since the invention of the printing press (some three centuries ago) culture has shifted to the visual. Functional literacy is higher than ever, but the emphasis is away from text and toward image.

Images are a language all their own. Some days I feel as though I'm at a disadvantage because even though I understand images perfectly well, my "native" language is text. My visual rhetoric, the act of drawing or photographing or illustrating or whathaveyou (if you can imagine those acts as a parallel to speaking or writing) has a distinct accent.

And that's why I let my esteemed colleague, Cassie, do the drawing. She's fluent.

Merci Dieux, c'est le fin de semaine.