From the course: Graphic Design Foundations: Ideas, Concepts, and Form

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Cultural communication

Cultural communication

From the course: Graphic Design Foundations: Ideas, Concepts, and Form

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Cultural communication

- An idea succeeds when the audience understands it and embraces it. Too often, clients tell me that their audience is everybody. That's a wide net, and I do my best to narrow it down. Once we've reached consensus on who we are speaking to, I find icons to be especially potent as a communication tool. They speak clearly to specific groups and have resonance when understood. The Montreal Olympics in 1976 followed tragedy and political violence at the 1972 Olympics. Raymond Bellemare decided to communicate the peaceful and nonpolitical nature of the Olympics with iconography. To achieve this, Bellemare used the symbol of a denim jacket that spoke to youth culture at the time, and a series of buttons, each with a unique icon. It's not important to know what every icon represents. What's important is that the viewer have a connection to the icons that he or she recognizes as part of their world. Modifying recognizable…

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