Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

I’m about to say something that threatens my employability, or at least the figure in front of the zeros on my payslip each month. Design is more important than words. You can write the sharpest prose imaginable: if it’s badly presented, it will look sloppy and unprofessional.

Of course the reverse is also true: stylish design spattered with verbose nonsense smacks of all fur coat and no knickers. But it at least has the advantage that it looks ok from a distance.

I got to thinking about this because a designer friend of mine pointed out that while she likes what I write, she finds the black background makes it difficult to read the words. In a blog about communicating clearly, I’ve committed the cardinal sin of letting the design get in the way of the message.

I have a feeble excuse for this: it’s because I couldn’t think of a suitable picture to put at the top. The problem is that pictures come with immediate associations. A word’s meaning can be fluid, capricious, bent to the context it’s used in, in combination with other words. A picture leaps out of the screen and claims the meaning for itself. For this blog (broadly Anglo-French, focusing on language, corporate communication and translation) a picture of lots of flags might do the trick – except that flags make you think of politics. A picture of London? Finance. Paris? One of those blogs about Anglo-Saxons discovering smelly cheese and sexy people. Tower of Babylon? Too academic, un-corporate.

Bad design is worse than no design at all. It can cheapen, distort or constrict in a way that the odd badly-chosen adjective cannot. It plays the lead role in forming the reader’s first impression (and given that in the age of social media most people have the attention span of a gnat, this may well turn out to be the only impression they form.) And yes, I know there’s no such thing as “no design” – the minute you choose Helvetica over Arial or white background over black, you become a designer – but let’s say the potential for gaffes is lower than if you start sticking your holiday snaps at the top of the page.

Of course design is about more than pictures – the very best design is so much an extension of the structure and essence of the message that the user barely notices it. But I’m definitely not there yet. So if you think of a decent picture and a nice background colour I can use, please let me know.