Why Visual Communication is So Important

I majored in English, so I had a lot of experience with writing, but it wasn’t until I taught rhetoric and argumentative writing during my PhD that I understood why writing is taught as a core competency. So many students were unprepared not only to write essays, but to communicate via emails, make presentations and pitches, and generally express both their message and their own authority.

In the working world, it’s absolutely necessary to communicate cleanly, articulately, and competently. Good writing is one of the most effective ways we do that, but increasingly, we also rely on visual communication. From the ubiquity of UX design to the demand for intuitive interfaces, it’s clear that the way something looks can be just as meaningful as what it says. We might assume this is mostly about reducing friction or making things easier to process, but I think there’s something deeper at play.

Visual communication is a form of rhetoric. We often treat rhetoric as a property of language, but it exists in every deliberate choice we make in contexts where interpretation happens. And we are always interpreting, especially through the senses.

Consider the moment you step into a new space. You take in the size of the doorway, the contrast between inside and out, the way the air shifts. Maybe you hear the echo of footsteps or the quiet murmur of conversation. The light might go soft and filtered, or become sharp and clinical. You know almost instantly whether you’ve entered a hotel lobby or a government office, and along with that impression comes a sense of how you’re supposed to behave. No one had to explain it. The environment made it clear.

Presentations work the same way. The more care you take with their design, the more effectively they speak for you, even before a single word is read aloud. That’s rhetoric, too.