Find me a church like this and I will attend religiously. This video made by "airloaf" is hilarious, but why is it featured in my "Good Design" category? Simple. It's the perfect example for the favorite topic of my former design professor Paul Lottermann a.k.a. "Bruno Paulot": A picture can tell more than a thousand words. In one of his many experiments he took a simple photo of a woman, standing next to a river, looking at the other riverside where you can see a power plant. He then mailed this photo to different people, including celebrities and politicians. He asked them to write a little caption to the picture, anything they like, and then send it back to him. The collected captions were then published in a book. It's simply amazing how different the human mind and its perception is. Everyone saw the same picture, but everyone saw a different story... So yeah: A picture tells more than a thousand words, which is photography's and video's strength. But a picture can also leave too much room for interpretation, which is where text and audio come in. They help to put the picture into the right context. The art of design is to say the right things with text or audio, while not simply boring the viewer and repeating what's already been said visually. It's a basic rule of good design: A user who has to think for himself will be interested and spend time with your product. If it's too abstract and too hard to figure out though, it gets frustrating and you lose your audience. Good photo/video - text/audio relation is a fine line, but if it's done right a simple video of people rocking out in church can make your day.
Related Links:
http://www.youtube.com/user/airloaf
Amazon: Ein Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte
May 21, 2009