Breaking Images: a method for improving design students’ visual literacy

In looking for a competitive edge, a growing number of organisations are adopting design thinking strategies, with a focus on visual methods. The future may be more about visual design as a thinking tool, and less as an end in itself. Graphic designers, illustrators, and those that educate them, must start to concern themselves with how pictures can be put to use with deliberate intent. Our pedagogical approach is to encourage students to break an image down into pictures of different levels of fidelity. To develop these competences some principles are borrowed from J.J Gibson, who separated the definitions of image and picture . This allows students to think about the tasks towards which they put images, and to consider what kind of picture—specific or more universal—is most appropriate to fix the image down. Lessons provoke students to imagine a world without text, where deliberate visual communication can only be had with the appropriate choice of pictures. These methods, intended to improve the visual literacy capabilities of students, are developed against the challenging backdrop presented by a contemporary culture which assumes that effective depiction is accurate depiction and that pictures are necessarily more vague than words.