Question

Youtube

Foundations of Communications - Visuals

Duration: 2:56

Please view the video and click the above title link to submit an original (in your own words) synopsis/commentary of what you viewed. Submissions should be minimum 150 words. Be sure to include at least one specific principle from this week's chapter coverage as you see it illustrated in the video. (You don't have to reference a principle from each chapter-just tie the video concepts back to something you recognize from the text/Powerpoint content for the week).

Answer 1

Synopsis or commentary on the video and its content:

They say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a thousand pictures.

As the name, the title, and the contents, audio, including video suggests, defines, describes, and explains about the topic, and the concept of communications, the representation of information, especially through visuals. As the foundations or basics, in order for one person to communicate with another, he/she first, decides what to communicate, what information (resources) should be involved and included in the communication, how the same should be communicated and the message to be conveyed to the other person or audience as a whole. It is about the way, representation, or style, or even a demonstration of communicating a message or information to someone.

Also, the content explains professional communications that could be used in enterprises, organizations, one's educational, and professional life. Content, message, or information can be conveyed to people in many different ways for easier, powerful, convincing, clearer, nicer, attractive, impressive, quicker, simpler, efficient, and effective understanding, realization, analysis, and co-relating things.

Information can be represented in texts, Powerpoint presentations, pictures, images or photos, videos, graphs or charts, etc. Pictures provide us a lot of information and details, thus letting us understand the situation, scenario, environment, perspectives, conditions of things, people, world, nature, any abstract things captured in it, right at that moment when it was captured. Here, in this case, we discuss the visuals in pictures, images, or photos forms. In fact, there are many types of visuals one can use to express his/her message, information and share knowledge.

Hence, as a foundation and avoiding hurdles, one should communicate information representing them through visuals in a responsible and effective way. Doing this would enhance one's message or information and as a whole his/her communications itself.

When it comes to the types of visuals, there are symbols, maps, graphs, charts, diagrams, figures, flowcharts, illustrations, photos (images or pictures), 3D models, and infographics. Depending on the audience or the other person receiving the information and the purpose (intention) of one's message, one could use any of the above visual types accordingly.

The purpose of visual types could be decorative- drawing others' attention; representational- creating meaning associating to an already existing thing; analogical- two or more things, say, pictures showed highlighting either the similarities or differences among them; and organizational- representing connections, relationships, flow, hierarchy, etc., providing structure to information.

The next step is to gather information and creating the representation of the same which is, time-consuming, difficult, requires efforts, skills, and talent. One could find different types of visuals online on the Internet, which is a great, easy, and very flexible option. However, one should abide by the copyright infringement law.

This video markets, endorses, and advertises the product and service called "Creative Commons", that can be used to find, gather, remix, and reuse visuals. Creative Commons offers users or people a license with its own certain conditions such as copyrights and images that could be shred in the public domain. Also, once when one finds a visual, say, an image for the information he wants to represent through, chooses the same, and later he/she can manipulate, edit, size, shape, decorate, make placements, using enough white space, rotating, cropping, and any other important image-editing skills.

Using Creative Commons tools, one could responsibly find and use images enhancing one's messages without any pitfalls and representing a powerful communication.