JKR

It’s a great idea – twenty six writers, each in sixty two words, create a piece of art which compliments or re-frames a piece from the V&A British Galleries collection. You can read about the project’s genesis here, and more about the project here along with some considered musings on the relationship between words and pictures.

For someone who works in graphic communication the marriage of words and image are a daily preoccupation. Being dyslexic, I have a bias towards drawing over writing. To my mind, pictures deliver a clarity and can be appreciated at their surface, where words can be more broadly interpreted – they have depths which offer ambiguity. This is as true of a piece about a sculpture as it is a marketer’s written brief. The brief comes alive when concretely manifested in a picture.

That’s my prejudice. Of course, one medium is not superior to the other; when they fuse together, the results are greater than the sum of the parts. Indeed, to nod towards one cliché, if pictures provide the cover, words offer up the book beneath.  An obvious observation, but some folk lean towards the image and others the word. I think the knack for judging the merits of a piece of design, I believe, is to focus equal attention on the effectiveness of that aspect of the work, be it words or pictures, which is outside one’s personal centre of gravity. Because powerful branding comes from meshing them brilliantly together.