Chapter 6 of Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy digs deeper into how artists visually communicate. The focus is on the four factors in visual communication: artist and audience, content and form. Particularly, Dondis talks about how content (what is being expressed) and its intrinsic tie to form (how it is being expressed). I found it curious how Dondis specified that in visual media, content is never detached from form – I find that this same trend exists in all the arts, including the ones he mentioned, such as music, prose, dance, and so on. A message conveyed through limerick is certainly not the same as one conveyed through sonnet.

Dondis talks about how the designer can only determine three out of the four aforementioned factors: artist, content, and form. Designers will target certain audiences, however, to try to determine all four. To me this raises two questions: do we have a duty to create art that will be understood by all audiences, and do we have a right to limit our art only to those who we think will understand it?

Dondis also challenges the notion that artists are simply struck by fits of inspiration or intuition, instead emphasizing visual intelligence and the ability of an artist to make quick decisions when sketching or concepting. True visual communication comes when all individual effects of an image come together to convey the same message, idea, or feeling. To me, the presence of some of these effects almost suggest the rest – i.e. Figure 6.3 has no color, but I can almost see the bright, bold colors that would be associated with it.

Dondis dedicates the rest of the chapter to discussion of techniques for visual communication. I found many of these interesting, but also redundant in a way. For example, symmetry and asymmetry seem like a subset of balance and instability, and predictability and spontaneity seem to include consistency/variation, sequentiality/randomness, and repetition/episodicity.