Breaking Images: a method for improving design students’ visual literacy

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.34314/pxxnyy43

Abstract

In looking for a competitive edge, a growing number of organisations are adopting design thinking strategies, with a focus on visual methods. The future may be more about visual design as a thinking tool, and less as an end in itself. Graphic designers, illustrators, and those that educate them, must start to concern themselves with how pictures can be put to use with deliberate intent.

Our pedagogical approach is to encourage students to break an image down into pictures of different levels of fidelity. To develop these competences some principles are borrowed from J.J Gibson, who separated the definitions of image and picture . This allows students to think about the tasks towards which they put images, and to consider what kind of picture—specific or more universal—is most appropriate to fix the image down.

Lessons provoke students to imagine a world without text, where deliberate visual communication can only be had with the appropriate choice of pictures. These methods, intended to improve the visual literacy capabilities of students, are developed against the challenging backdrop presented by a contemporary culture which assumes that effective depiction is accurate depiction and that pictures are necessarily more vague than words.

Author Biographies

  • Dr Stuart Medley, UNIDCOM, IADE and Edith Cowan University

    Stuart Medley is a research fellow at UNIDCOM, Portugal, and an honorary associate professor of design at Edith Cowan University exploring the application of comics for legal contracts and in the health sector. He authored the book, The Picture in Design, and other publications, including for Wiley’s Companion to Illustration. He makes comics to improve employment and housing services, and has worked as an illustrator for 25 years with clients including Anglicare and Austal Ships in Australia, and in the UK, the Imperial War Museums. He is a co-founder and art director for Hidden Shoal, a record label with a roster of international artists, with the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting, and Showtime as clients. He is a co-founder and Funding Director of the Perth Comic Arts Festival.

  • Dr Hanadi Haddad, Edith Cowan University

    Dr. Hanadi Haddad has a background in Interactive Media, Design and Interactive Television. She is a lecturer and supervisor at ECU in Design in the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Research interests include Strategic Visual Communication, Design Thinking, Service Design and Innovation, Co-Design/Creation, Usability, Design Theory and Work Integrated Learning. Previously she was a Post-doctoral Research Associate at Murdoch University. A graduate of Curtin University her PhD involved multidisciplinary research into visual modalities of character agents between the School of Design and School of Computer Science.

Published

2025-08-27

Issue

Vol. 59 No. 2 (2025): Visible Language: 59.2

Section

Journal Article