Cultural Dimensions of Visual Communication We live and communicate in both global and local contexts, consequently the world in which we live is both large and small.

It is peopled with those similar to us and quite different from us in language, culture and communication habit.

Each person is shaped by a unique combination of inheritance and experience.

People in the same community or environment share many experiences and learned patterns of behavior which become so familiar that they may be unaware that other groups have very different systems.

Culture is often thought of and composed of the products of a civilization: Art, music, dance, literature, architecture, clothes, foods, and festivals. These are the aspects of culture which can be discovered through the senses and are obvious sources of discussions, delight and comparison.

Designers can communicate much more effectively if they learn about the culture they wish to communicate with. An example:http://designforum.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=%5Fgetfullarticle&aid=2334150

By learning about a culture a designer can begin to know what is significant to that culture.

The Aborigines who live in the Western Desert of Australia make wonderful paintings. These paintings, filled with wavy lines, circles, and curves, are decorated with hundreds of small dots.

To outsiders, the pictures are beautiful patterns filled with color. But to the Aborigines, these patterns tell stories. The stories are about their ancestors from long ago. The stories are called Dreamings.

Dreamings are an important part of the values and beliefs of the Aborigines.

Some of the stories are sacred and can only be shared with Aborigines. Other stories can be told to everyone. When an artist paints one of these stories, he will tell us what the painting is about. One design that we start to recognize is the large circle with smaller circles inside.

This pattern usually stands for a camp site. Another design looks like a squiggly wave. It usually means water or rain. The land on which Aborigines live is very important to them. Their designs often stand for things about nature and the earth.

Social Symbolism

In many traditional societies, marriages were arranged by parents or other elders. Sometimes the young people involved could turn down a marriage they did not want, but other times the couple had no choice at all.

Most, if not all, cultures have kind of symbol system to show whether a person is married or single.

In Canada and the USA, most common is the use of wedding and engagement rings.

Among traditional Mennonites, if a door is painted green, it means there is a daughter eligible for marriage.

The Zulu people of Southern Africa developed a complex code using colored beads.

In Zulu tradition adulthood comes with marriage, and married people have advantages over those who are not. This created a major incentive for young men to gather enough wealth to purchase what was required as marriage goods. Traditional wealth was measured in cattle, and only a man with enough cattle could afford to marry.

Young girls learned bead work and the meaning of the symbols and colors used from their older sisters. The bead work was usually worn as a head or neck band. Men depended on female relatives to explain the code. They can see whether a woman is engaged, married, unmarried, has children or unmarried sisters. The patterns and colours can also tell what region a woman comes from and what her social standing is.http://www.edunetconnect.com/cat/soccult/afrval.html

Ways of problem solving, conversing, building relationships, making requests are all learned from childhood and reinforced and adapted through experience.

By observing parent, siblings, and peers as they interact we are not only establish patterns of behavior, but sets of values and beliefs.

Workplace groups establish their own set of norms influenced by roles, academic field, status, funding tasks etc.

Rules of behavior become so well established and internalized that we may never be conscious that our own 'culture' is not universal.

These learned rules, values and beliefs become 'the software of the mind' (Hofstede, 1992) or the filter through which we interpret events around us.

The proliferation of the media as an environment of information is prompting new questions about the role of visual images in reflecting, creating, and communicating cultural values, history, and national and community identities.”

B. Edwards

Communities are increasingly not only in contact, but are interdependent for communal well being – from sharing resources and trade to sharing ideas and human values - from sharing aid during disaster to sharing common visions of a future.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3982/is_200301/ai_n9178239

ContentCommunication design is central to the global information society and the global economy. What cultural factors are involved in constructing a design strategy that can withstand the demands of global markets? How does the meaning of an image change according to its cultural context?

Communication design is a global industry, increasing its power along with the increasing movement towards global economic integration.

With this change, new models of business, professional practice and communication have emerged. But so have new political and ethical dilemmas, particularly in relation to global advertising and the commercial strategies of multi-national corporations.

Country-specific symbols include anything that portrays a way of life or culturally specific knowledge.

For example, in Arabic cultures the use of pictures of men, women, and animals is discouraged, while elaborate text in a calligraphic style is acceptable and liked.

Furthermore, use of visual metaphors (star, crescent, cross), animal figures, religious objects and signs, taboo words, graphics of hand gestures, aesthetic codes, forbidden food (beef in India), may need a detailed inquiry of the specific culture.

Icons can be very country-specific. When analyzing a Website special attention is needed to know whether the icon is understood in a particular culture. For example, the icons of a yellow school bus, or a red hexagonal sign, and an American mailbox with a flag may not be well understood outside the U.S. Thus, when using icons on the Web, country-specific understanding is needed.

In a cross-cultural communication situation the choice of symbols is particularly complex because the symbols must be culturally acceptable to the audience as well as the designer.

In other words, designers are sometimes inclined to make decisions based solely or primarily on their aesthetic judgment. They may find themselves proposing design solutions that reflect their own culture and exhibit little sensitivity to the nuances of symbols and colors used in other cultures.

In instrumental communication, such as advertising, designers must also be aware of the appeal of their visual messages to the targeted audience and also consider the functional requirements of the message objectives.

In cross-cultural communication, however, the aesthetic and functional decisions are further impacted by the cultural filters of both the communicator and the audience. http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/cultpalette.html

The Problem

Imagine you are a designer who has been asked by a local McDonald's owner to develop a poster and other visuals for a Hispanic Heritage program for that store. The store wants to emphasize its sensitivity to the local Hispanic culture of both customers and employees who come from the surrounding neighborhood.

The designer developed a poster proposal featuring Picasso's Don Quixote and the manager questioned whether this was an appropriate symbol for the local Hispanic community, most of whom traced their roots to Mexico rather than Spain.

The problem the designer faced was determining what symbols and colors could be used to communicate visually in a way that depicted the Hispanic community with sensitivity, at the same time communicated in an interesting way to non-Hispanic people about the culture.

Cross-cultural communication can be either one-way or two-way.

In one-way communication, such as advertising, one culture, usually a dominant or majority one, communicates to another which is a subculture. I

In the McDonald's case a company run largely by white middle-class Anglos was attempting to develop a message for Hispanics with which it does business.

In two-way cross-cultural communication, the symbols that are appropriate to use in communication with the subculture have to also communicate effectively about the subculture to the majority culture.

In other words, the colors and symbols are appropriate and deliver meaning for both the subculture and the majority culture. In the McDonald's example, that means that the design package must also be appealing and communicate just as effectively to the Anglo employees and customers who will also see the poster.

It should also be noted that cross-cultural communication projects are sometimes location specific. A specific Korean-American community, for example, may share a general set of culturally nuanced symbols with other Korean-American communities, but it may also be different in its view of the appropriateness of specific symbols because of its history and traditions.

That is particularly true for the tremendous variety of distinctive cultures loosely identified in the U.S. as Hispanic which includes such source cultures as Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, and Spanish, among others. The confusion also lies in the terms we use for these groups such as Hispanic, Chicano, Latino, and Mexican American, terms which also carry nuanced meanings.

The Concept of a Cultural Palette

In order to better assess the cultural acceptability of design symbols, the concept of a cultural palette has been developed to assist the designer in the development of culturally sensitive symbols.

A palette is the board on which an artist mixes colors, but the word is also used to refer to the range of colors used in a particular painting.

The idea of a cultural palette was developed by the author and a graduate student who used it as the focus for her master's thesis. (Sandra E. Moriarty and Lisa Rohe, "Cultural Palettes: An Exercise in Sensitivity for Designers," Journalism Educator, Winter, 1992, p. 32-37.)

It is a method to develop a set of culturally sensitive set of symbols and colors as well as other graphic elements such as layouts and artistic styles which may reflect cultural nuances.

The Assessment Process

In general, the procedure involves first compiling an image bank of symbols and colors.

These materials can be accumulated from books, magazines, brochures, advertising, packaging--or any other source of graphics that are targeted to that group--as well as from interviews with cultural representatives. Then a panel of experts is identified who will review the image bank and identify the ones that are good (appropriate and inoffensive) and poor (inappropriate and offensive) symbols and colors.

The final step is to create the palette of colors and symbols that provides a range of culturally sensitive graphics at the same time identifying the insensitive or inappropriate colors and symbols that need to be avoided.

Subculture Images.

For the local part of the study, the research analyzed the packaging and merchandising of American products and products with Spanish language labels in grocery stores in the Hispanic neighborhood. Other sources included Spanish language publications available within the community, interviews with local Hispanic media representatives, Hispanic art in museums or books, and discussions of the subculture's graphic code in other articles and books.

The Spanish labeled products used the same color palette as the American foods-red, green, yellow, and brown. Most of the designs were bands of color with type. Typically the packages used very little artwork and few symbols. One package used a green bowl with flames coming out of it.

Interviews were conducted with Hispanic community representatives, media executives, and university specialists. More specifically, the eight experts consulted for this study included a specialist in Latino culture at the Museum of Natural History, an advertising executive who owns an agency that specializes in Hispanic advertising, the editor of a Spanish language newspaper, the owner of a Spanish language radio station, the research director and a policy analyst for the Latin American Research and Service Agency, the research director at the BuenoCenter for Multicultural Studies on campus, and the director of Chicano Studies.

Image Bank Creation and Evaluation. These two sets of symbols and colors were compiled and presented visually as an image bank.

Most appropriate colors: green, red, and white (the colors of the Mexican flag), yellow, brown, and orange.

Least appropriate colors: black, purple, turquoise, burgundy, gray, sand, mauve, and pastels. Blue, the color that dominates most appeals to Anglos, is rarely appropriate according to these experts. (Note that this list includes the Taco Bell color palette.)

Most appropriate symbols: anything that says "familia" such as home and hearth, chili peppers (symbols for traditional cooking but also the red and green relate back to the flag), and circles (hands and arms interlinked reflect back to the family or home motif). Also the historical Aztec and Mayan symbols were identified as appropriate. The Spanish language itself was identified as a positive symbol with suggestions that Spanish words can be used as graphic markers.

Least appropriate symbols: sombreros, cactus, donkeys, man sleeping against a cactus, Frito bandito and Juan Valdez (the experts did not approve of any symbol that signified peasants, bandits, or outlaws). Southwest images, such as pueblos, and Southwest colors were declared to be more representative of the American Southwest than Mexico.

http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/cultpalette.html

The growth of the Internet as an international communication medium raises new issues and challenges for the standardization or adaptation of international marketing communications.

The Web, on one hand, is globally accessible and capable of mass communication (Hassan & Blackwell, 1994).

On the other hand, the Web attracts information savvy 'inter-market' segments, is inherently interactive, and is capable of high levels of customization (Hassan & Blackwell, 1994; Ju-Pak, 1999; Sheth & Sisodia, 1997).

This leads to the questions: 'Are standardized or adapted Web-sites more effective at attracting and keeping global consumers?'

Cultural values have a significant effect on communication. They provide broad guidelines for acceptable ways of behaving and acting in particular situations (Feather, 1995); they influence how we interact and socialize with other members of society (Rokeach, 1973); they affect the valences we attach to different situations (Feather, 1995); and they are a powerful force shaping our motivations, lifestyles, and product choices (Tse, et al., 1989).

In essence, cultural values represent the most basic and core beliefs of a society, and these beliefs largely influence our communication patterns.

Culture-Related Design Criteria

One example of international advertising research is Okazaki's and Alonso's (2003) comparison of 150 websites of Japanese multinational companies in Japan, Spain, and the USA.

These were analyzed by analogy with a classification of advertising appeals into "soft sell" appeals (indirect approaches creating emotions and atmosphere by visuals and symbols) versus "hard sell" appeals (direct approaches highlighting product features with explicit information and competitive persuasion).

In general, the former advertising appeals prevail in High-context cultures whereas the latter prevail in Low-context cultures (de Mooij, 1998; Mueller, 1996, 2004). Accordingly, the Japanese websites analyzed revealed the highest rate of soft sell appeals, whereas the US websites revealed the highest rate of hard sell appeals and vice versa; the Spanish websites revealed a nearly equal rate of both appeals. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/hermeking.html

Figure 6. General relation between creative strategy and communication styles

(Context has to do with how much you have to know before you can communicate effectively.)

High-context cultures, which according to Hall and Hall (1990) are often characterized by a "Polychronic" time orientation.

In Polychronic cultures, time is often regarded as circular and repeating, subject to social relationships or needs and therefore handled in a flexible, imprecise way.

Action chains are structured in a less detailed way and interrupted more often since many things are done simultaneously.

Polychronic appropriate websites include lots of entertaining visuals, animated illustrations, and even real multimedia elements.

Explicit navigation support is rare since neither a strictly ordered route through the less detailed site structure nor very quick orientation is necessary.

Implicit symbolic cues, however, support an intuitive navigation, which enhances both preferred entertainment appeals and positive affect in website use. This, for example, is demonstrated above with the

homepages of Coca-Cola USA (Monochronic: http://www.coca-cola.com/usa) in contrast to Coca-Cola Italy (Polychronic; the latter also includes sound effects - http://www.coca-cola.it).

Designers can benefit from learning more about the culture they seek to

communicate with.

Research about the culture provides a thoughtful base from which to work and

create meaningful messages.