Applied Theory

Creative Consulting

Professional communicators are increasingly involved in developing documents, both print and online, that include still images such as photographs, illustrations, and diagrams. During my 20-year career as a creative consultant, I have seen the ratio of visuals to text per page in public documents such as brochures, pamphlets, and reports increase steadily. In the case of online documents, rapid advances in browsers and other technologies have transformed the Internet, formerly a text-only medium, into the World Wide Web, a highly visual publishing environment in which Tyner finds an historic echo: "The way that pictures and texts work together in multimedia interfaces is reminiscent of the visually stunning illustrations of Biblical texts seen in the illuminated manuscripts of medieval times" (1998 p. 40).