JESSICA HAGY (INDEXED) VIZTHINK PRESENTATION

Indexed by Jessica Hagy at VizThink ‘09

This is a great little presentation by Jessica Hagy (indexed) on the importance of captions:

So much of the visual thinking world…is all about “Let’s simplify it! Let’s make it so transparent and obvious that we won’t have to write up a giant memo, we’ll just draw a picture, it’ll be super,” and that’s it. But the fact is, the more simple the image is, the more ways there are to interpret it. It’s a Rorschach test for whoever’s looking at it. Even when you go to a Flickr site and you look at people’s images, you’re kind of like, “Wow, that’s a really interesting image, but what is it?” And those captions almost tell more of a story than the picture does.

Spoken like a true copywriter!

She also goes on to talk about stock photos, and how stock photos can be used to sell anything:

Well worth checking out, as Hagy is right: a good portion of the VizThink community is all about “if only we find the perfect, simple image, all communication problems will be solved!” Should stir up some folks.

(PS. Until the end, I didn’t realize that Tom asked a question by me.)