Cross-channel pollination

Design Management Journal, Fall 2003 by Birdsall, Connie, Murphy, Brendan

Intriguingly, Connie Birdsall and Brendan Murphy have discovered that as communications go digital, the outcome has been greater similarity-rather than greater diversity-among media. Addressing this phenomenon, they discuss the evolution of this cross-channel pollination and outline principles to guide the development of effective communications in this Digital Age.

If you are feeling that the more things change, the more they look the same... you're not imagining things. Icons from the Internet are appearing in print. CNN Headline News is starting to resemble the AOL home page. The screens of bank ATM machines dance with animated ads while you're waiting to make a deposit, and the latest cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) transmit pictures in living color. PowerPoint presentations are moving closer to video, and multimedia promotions that fill entire walls in trend-driven retail stores bear a striking resemblance to MTV music videos. Magazines like Wired layer the visual languages from print, television, gaming, and the Web to create an altogether unique experience.

Placing the same digital tools in the hands of virtually every designer has not only democratized visual communications; in many cases, it has also made one medium graphically indistinguishable from another.

This cross-pollination of communication channels is not so much the start of a new design movement a Ia Bauhaus or DeStijl as it is an effort on the part of each medium to learn from the others. Although the Macintosh computer has been around for nearly two decades, digital cameras, digital projectors, and the like are only now finding broader acceptance. Adapting and borrowing ideas from disciplines that are already using the technology is part of the natural integration process. That has been pretty much the case throughout history, even as ancient pictographs evolved into letterforms and medieval scribes established traditions that remain the foundation of graphic display today. Technological breakthroughs may be revolutionary, but adoption of them tends to be evolutionary. A comfort level of acceptance must first be built. People have to put foreign ideas into the context of what they already know-that's why the first trains were described as "iron horses" and the first automobiles were called "horseless carriages." The more radical the new technology, the more it has to ease itself into people's lives so that it doesn't scare them with something that seems totally alien and unfathomable.

The genius of the Apple Macintosh in 1984 was its use of easily recognizable telegraphic icons as graphical metaphors to help users understand what was going on inside their computers. An icon on the computer screen represented an object or a program in the hard drive. The concepts of folders and files on a desktop and even a trash bin were everyday things that people understood how to use. Clicking on a folder to find a file made sense. Dragging an icon over to a trashcan seemed much more intuitive than typing in an unintelligible sequence of letters, numbers, and back-slashes on the command line. This graphical user interface (GUI), popularized by the Mac, encouraged even avowed Luddites to move into the computer age.

A new shorthand language

What is happening today is that the icons themselves have evolved into their own visual language, extending far beyond the computer screen. Through frequent exposure, computer users worldwide have come to grasp the meaning of familiar icons faster than text descriptions. The AOL mailbox with the little red flag up tells us "You've got mail." The house with a chimney indicates the home page on your Palm PDA (personal digital assistant). The magnifying-glass icon promises a thorough search. All these symbols trace their roots back to common cultural associations. The magnifying glass evokes images of super-sleuth Sherlock Holmes. The diskette icon still stands for Save, although few people use diskettes anymore. (In fact, how many city dwellers know that the raised flag on a mailbox signals the postman that there is a letter inside to be picked up?) As with so many words in our daily vocabulary, icons are understood in a current context, even when their origins are forgotten.

More than that, the digital icons are understood even in countries unfamiliar with Western traditions. People working in Tokyo or Mexico City or Berlin see the same desktop icons even though the words are in their own native languages. Graphical interfaces have become the new universal language.

Icons spoken here

People have become amazingly fluent in iconography. As a result, designers are making greater use of icons and culturally recognizable shapes in print and other media. Pictographs are being used to replace text headings. Shapes such as file-folder tabs set off and organize important information. And companies, such as Nike, and individuals, such as the rock star Prince, are using their symbols as stand-alone icons, without their full names spelled out beside them. Audiences have become knowledgeable about icons and logos. Designers of print also like to use these graphic elements because they make fun visuals, communicate an idea faster than words, and signal to readers that they are techsavvy.