Understanding the Visual Language

Christoph Niemann is an artist and an author who delivers an incredibly funny TED talk on illustration that reveals an important ability humans have but don't often recognize. The creative's work has appeared on the covers of noteworthy magazines like The New Yorker and WIRED, which testifies to his talent, expertize and qualification in delivering his keynote.

The talk on illustration concerns itself with the way ideas are communicated through the medium of art. Christoph Niemann points to the fact that humans are incredibly intuitive when it comes to reading images. He identifies illustration as a visual language that can take complex ideas and present them in a simple and accessible manner. In this sense, art is pretty much a language much like French, English or German.

Throughout his talk on illustration, Christoph Niemann shows the audience an entertaining collection of images that allow him to get his point across. The question of how much information one needs to communicate on-paper to trigger the audience's imagination arises. With a strong regard to negative space, Christoph Niemann turns to simplicity and abstraction, making minimal design decision in the process of developing a whole. He establishes private rituals like "Sunday Sketching" where he channels his observational capabilities and tries to empathize with the position of the 'reader.' At the end of the day, to be a good artist means to "have a good understanding of the visual and cultural vocabulary of your audience."