9 Show It: Powerful Ways to Make a Picture Exceed a Thousand Words
Long story, short. Visual communications are far more appealing than words alone. Explore simple, more effective ways that prove a picture’s worth a thousand words.
Show-and-Tell: Which Would You Choose?
When you think about showing what you mean, always consider the audience members’ perspective. Which of these would you choose if you were them?

• A textbook with 500 pages filled with words or one with graphs, images, and diagrams?
• A three-page paid advertisement filled with text and a boring stock image or an online guide of interactive diagrams and video?
• A PowerPoint slide with 10 bullets or one with a one strong image and a catchy title? • An e-mail you scroll down three screens to finish reading or a link to a 1-minute video animation that simplifies it?
• A mobile phone with monochrome green or a smartphone with flashy icons?
• A presenter who simply reads the slides or one who draws throughout?
• A talking head video or a video with personal interviews, actual footage, and a real story?
These are the choices you make first so that your audience can get what you’re saying, easier and faster. If you do the hard work up front, your audience won’t have to pay the price later.

You Can See the Shift
We are transitioning from a text-based world to a visual one. Screens and interactive media pervade all parts of our lives. Screens are in our homes, our classrooms, our elevators, even our bathrooms. They have replaced phones, books, newspapers, billboards, and printed menus.
Some of the most popular types of social media are visually based: Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and Vine. Now more than ever, people expect the information they encounter on a day-to-day basis to interact, evolve, and engage. We are living in the age of infographics—compact and appealing visual interpretations of verbal or numerical data. Nowadays, media such as videos, infographics, illustrations, and animations all take center stage.
According to many studies, 65 percent of the population learns visually. Furthermore, studies show that whereas we remember only 10 percent of what we hear and 30 percent of what we read, we remember a whopping 80 percent of what we see. Given this appetite, there is an enormous opportunity for visual communication to increase the effectiveness and brevity of how we communicate.

Seeing Supersedes Reading
People’s preference for seeing over reading is more important than ever. We can look to USA Today founder Al Neuharth, who redefined journalism in the 1980s with his radically different take on newspapers, as an example of this.
After analyzing how people read newspapers at that time, Neuharth decided there needed to be an easier way to consume the daily news. As a result, USA Today stories are short, rarely jump to a second page, and use lots of visuals. Neuharth’s emphasis on the visual even created the cottage industry of infographics.
Neuharth wasn’t a newspaper purist. Rather, he belongs in the BRIEF Hall of Fame. He recognized the permanent shift from text to visuals and realized that people just don’t have the time or attention span to read a traditional paper anymore. He knew it was time to show readers what reporters meant.
A Visual Language
While people criticized Neuharth for doing this in the 1980s, he has influenced major newspapers and magazines today. Many, including the Wall Street Journal, now have smartphone and tablet apps with prominent video and interactive visual components alongside their daily articles. The days of text-heavy news pages are over. For all industries, communicating effectively today requires communicating visually.
But it’s difficult; after all, not everyone can easily make an infographic or naturally translate a narrative into a concise and compelling graph, chart, or illustration. Less than 3 percent of companies use visual communication, precisely because it’s diffi- cult to get it right. It’s easier to write than to find the right image worth 1,000 words. But making that extra effort up front makes all the difference when people pick up the report and understand exactly what we’re saying. To communicate our ideas visually, we need to engage both sides of our brain: the logical left and the creative right.

Although a headline might help, Paul Stannard, founder and CEO of SmartDraw, explains that communicating with images is six times more effective than words alone. He estimates that more unique information will be formed in one year today than in the past 5,000 years.
It truly is like learning to speak a different language.
When I first started Sheffield, one of my clients—Swedish software company CogMed—wanted to market its new software designed to help educate people with attention-deficit disorder (ADD). Its managers approached me because they wanted to extract a narrative for the U.S. market about the benefits of exercising working memory for people with noticeable cognitive limitations.
As you might imagine, the neuroscientists who designed this software are brilliant. But they were struggling to find a way to hold their audience’s attention more than ever. After all, their potential customers had ADD.
So we turned to infographic genius John Telford. We simpli- fied the information on the new software down to three points, and translated it into a one-page visual story. It was like speaking into an automatic visual translating machine.
“I use myself and the people I work with as test cases. It’s the ability to look at things from a different perspective than those who are immersed in it,” Telford said. “When I make an infographic, I’m saying, ‘Here’s how to explain the idea to someone who has no idea what you’re talking about, in the simplest terms.’ I can show it in a way that laymen can understand, because I am one of those people.”
Telford knew both languages, the verbal and the visual, and, like magic, he helped turn our verbal narrative into meaningful images.

“It’s a way of looking at information and being able to dissect it,” Telford said. “There are a lot of experts who can throw information at you, but the trick is getting somebody who isn’t familiar with the concept to understand the essence.”
It did the trick and helped CogMed tell the story visually.

Connect an Image with Your Story
Infographic designers need to first understand the essential point of what they are trying to communicate. This is the easy part. The hard part is finding a correlating visual that explains the story with images.
During the severe recession in 2008, I worked with some business executives who wanted me to present to a leadership team about the potential challenges inherent in communicating to employees during tough times. The economic slump was scary; some even compared it to the Great Depression.
I certainly did not know what it was like to live in the 1930s, but my dad used to tell me a story about my grandmother when she worked as a seamstress for Sears Roebuck in Chicago. Her job was to sew buttons on jackets all day long. Her secret for staying employed during the Depression was, if she finished her work before the day was over, she would go back and tear off all the buttons, and start all over again. Her mantra was “Make sure they always see you working.”
So I decided to use this story in my presentation. For my visual, I searched “jacket with buttons” on Google, put it on one slide, and told my story within 15 minutes. It was that simple. I identified the point I wanted to make and did a modest amount of visual research. This powerful pairing of the verbal and visual really worked.

Just do the hard work up front. It will have an enormous payoff for the audience on the back end.
Here are some easy ways to jump into the visual world.
1.Google images that relate to your presentation.
2.Draw during your presentations.
3.Find short videos online.
4.Make short videos of your own.
5.Use a whiteboard to illustrate.
6.Bring in small items for show-and-tell lessons.
7.Look into prezi.com for a different kind of presentation.
8.Show stunning photography instead of words.
9.Color-code your memos.
10.Substitute icons for frequently used words.

Momentary Magic: Infographics in Business
Visual communication distills complex information, explains it, makes it entertaining, and most important, makes it easy to consume. Mastering this art can immediately impact how you communicate highly complex ideas, both internally and externally.
Take, for example, what some publicly traded organizations such as GE, Sears, Walmart, and Apple do when they need an annual report for their shareholders. Annual reports usually have a lot of charts, images, and graphs to make it easier for the shareholder to understand the company’s current and predicted status. It’s almost a mini-magazine with a target, niche audience that doesn’t necessarily have all the time or background to deal with the raw data.

A lot of companies miss the mark, however, because although they include pictures to break up the text, these images don’t tell the specific story of the state of the organization.
You need to assume people won’t read what you write. The same cohesive story should appear in both the text and the illustration.

Breakdown of Complex Information
The Power of Infographics author Mark Smiciklas explains that 50 percent of our brain is dedicated to visual function.1 But even though we have an innate preference to learn visually, very few businesses choose to appease their customer’s appetite for visual information. For example, Monitise, a mobile money solutions provider, took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal digital edition that screamed, “Please, don’t read this, because we don’t know how to lead in today’s technological world.” The ad had only straight text and one uninteresting stock photo. It was like reading something in an outdated textbook. Talk about a dud. The potentially interactive experience fell completely flat, and their website was no better. The site had twice as many whitepapers as it did videos. Nothing about their ads or website demonstrated their services in a way that was visual or appealing.
One business that does visual communication right is marketing automation company Eloqua. Smiciklas describes how this organization uses infographics well to help people understand the dynamics of the online marketing space, often to explain the complexities of its software.
IKEA revolutionized the use of infographics in the furniture business. Anyone who’s ever purchased something from the Swedish company knows that there are no words when you open up any of IKEA’s assembly manuals—just pictures. They depict a person with an Allen wrench, illustrate the parts, and show how the furniture is put together. It’s an intuitive, semipainless way to build your own furniture.

The Age of YouTube and Business
Video storytelling is becoming a more prominent way not only to educate and market but also to entertain and engage audiences.
People share tens of thousands of YouTube videos every day. Companies around the world are creating their own YouTube or Vimeo channels to tell their story visually. They recognize that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. But as with any form of communication, when you create a video, you must be highly sensitive to your audience.
You want to keep videos short. The average video on YouTube is about 3.5 minutes; after that amount of time, people start to lose interest and click away. The longer the video, the more difficult it is for people to pay attention all the way through.
For instance, a colleague sent me the link to a video of an expert in online marketing campaigns. It was free to watch, so I opened it. The first thing I looked at was the counter in the bottom right hand corner of the video clip telling me runtime.
This particular video lasted 15 minutes. That’s longer than I like to watch, but my colleague gave such an enthusiastic endorsement of this guy that I clicked play. I got through 3 minutes, and then I began to wonder if I was interested enough to hang in for the full 15 minutes. After 3 minutes, the video lost my undivided attention, even though I was prepared to be fully engaged and interested in it.

Lean communicators have the muscle to trim what weighs them down
Will Strunk famously warned, “Omit needless words.” If a person is drowning, don’t add another ounce of water. Treat brevity as responsibility, empathy, and respect; become a lean communicator. Imagine if you had something important to share with someone who was running out the door to catch a train with very little time to spare. Treat all people like that, even when they’re not in a hurry.

Be mindful of the time and the quality. If your videos have an amateurish feel, you will lose your audience immediately.
Another idea is to offer episodic videos. YouTube and Vimeo offer channels for corporations to create a series. If your videos are short and engaging and have educational and entertainment value, people may even look forward to the next episode in your series, as they do with their favorite television show. You want to think more like a broadcaster and less like a marketer.
Smartphone cameras also make creating video content even more convenient—as evidenced by the following story about Charlie Meyerson, a radio broadcaster who uses his iPhone to shoot live events and post on his blog. Meyerson was walking through Daley Plaza in Chicago and saw a young African American boy giving an impassioned speech about school closings in the city. He quickly began recording the boy on his smartphone and posted 2 minutes of his speech with a little intro on his blog. This kid could very well be the future mayor of Chicago.
Videos are very powerful tools to capture short, punchy messages and are easy to share.

TL; DR: Too Long; Didn’t
Read You might be thinking, “I need to start creating infographics and shooting video right away.” But an even simpler, powerful way of improving your visual communication is simple document formatting.
Format is crucial for any written material, be it a report, an e-mail, or a book. Traditional business books don’t have graphics—but that trend is changing. If there are just words in a 100- to 150-page book in this day and age, it disregards the audience’s strong visual preferences. Only an arrogant author would expect you to read the book cover to cover to figure out what he’s trying to say. He should have the courtesy to summarize in many ways the moral of his story with images.

TL; DR—too long; didn’t read—is the response of today’s generation when messages fail to meet its expectation of brevity. This applies to e-mails, posts, and even books.
Here are a couple ways of making your written communication shorter and more appealing:
• Make it inviting. Deliver a strong title or subject line that’s your invitation.
• Limit your e-mail to the original window. Your message is too long if the recipient has to scroll down to read it.
• Embrace the white space. Make sure there’s white space and balance throughout the text. Instead of 8- to 10-sentence paragraphs, make them three to four sentences with returns in between.
• Make it bold. If you have a key idea in a document, call it out by making it bold.
• Use bullets and numbers. Start each point with a strong word or catchy phrase.
• Cut the fluff. Trim what’s unnecessary, leaving a consumable and concise size.
The format, length, and layout of your text indicates if what’s inside is amazing—or not worth their time.
The question on everyone’s mind right now is, “Can you show me?” Pictures, animation, and infographics make complex, convoluted, lengthy ideas accessible and consumable for people. Satisfy this expectation, and train your audience to come back for more.
Long story, short. Visual communications are far more appealing than words alone. Explore simple, more effective ways that prove a picture’s worth a thousand words.