Immediate costs and rewards loom larger than future ones.
More quotesSix per cent remembered the wound-care technique from text alone. With cartoons showing each step, the figure became 46 per cent. That is not a decorative uplift. It is a forty-point bollocking for anyone who thinks communication is finished when the words are technically correct.
The useful word here is showing. A photograph of a smiling clinician would make the leaflet visual in the sense that it contained a picture. It would contribute almost nothing to the task. The cartoons carried direction, position and sequence—the information patients later had to reproduce with their hands.
Corporate visual language has somehow come to mean gradients, icons and stock people pointing at whiteboards. That stuff can establish mood. It cannot demonstrate how to clean a wound, fit a part or find the reset control. Calling it visual communication is like calling hold music customer support because both involve sound.
Words still earn their place. Dosage, exceptions and timing demand precision. An illustration can make one example look universal or hide the difference between two similar steps. The sensible division follows the information: draw spatial action; write exact conditions; use both when failure matters.
The test also follows the task. Do not ask whether the page looked reassuring. Take the leaflet away, wait three days and ask the patient to perform the technique. A design prize cannot disinfect anything.
Someone will still request a photograph because the page feels “a bit clinical”. Fine. Put it on the cover if there is room. Keep the ugly arrows where the work happens.