Visual Images vs. Mental Images

A visual image is a simple thing, a picture that enters the eyes.

But a mental image is more complex.

Assembled in the mind from information real and imagined, mental images are complex composites of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, opinion and mood, combined with associative memories, both conscious and unconscious.

A visual image in the hand of an artist is merely a tool to trigger a mental image. The mental image is what we're after. Whether speaking in the language of Shape, Color, Music, Symbol or Word, our goal is always to trigger a mental image.

The visual image above the headline of today's memo is the stylized drawing of a home. If you noticed the baseball replacing the sun in the sky, the drawing made a different statement. It may have been confusing for a moment, but then you remembered ‘home plate' in the batter's box, or of how baseball represents Mom and Home and Apple Pie, or of how the game's players were once called “the boys of summer.”

The drawings of the home and the baseball were selected to trigger an assortment of mental images. Likewise, the words themselves – “home” and “baseball” – trigger mental images equally rich in tangental and associative memories.

Here's an example of what I mean. In the words of the late Bart Giamatti, “There is no great, long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself its own great, long poem. This had occurred to me in the course of my wondering why home plate wasn't called fourth base. And then it came to me, ‘Why not? Meditate on the name, for a moment, ‘home.'' Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness that cling to the word ‘home' and are absent from ‘house' or even ‘my house.' Home is a concept, not a place; it's a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins, a mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original; perhaps like others, especially those one loves; but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate, and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen. All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it is about going home. It's about rejoining; rejoining a beloved, rejoining parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things. And ‘going home' is where that restoration occurs, because that's where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It's the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started. All the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – but not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here, back around to here.”

Wow. Who knew that two simple words, baseball and home, could conjure such a rich array of mental images? Words and pictures can do that. This is why we must select them carefully when our goal is to trigger a mood or change an opinion.

If you want to experience still yet another – slightly disturbing – mental image of what ‘home' can mean, take a look at the famous painting by Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World.

If you found today's memo interesting and would like to learn how to stack shape, color, music, symbol and word so that you deepen the public's perception of your message, or if you'd like to learn how to use contradictory signals to elevate people's interest, you need to be in Austin next week for a class that will blow your mind.

Or, you can stay home and be bored:)

I hope to see you here.

Roy H. Williams