Picture this: the role of images in IC

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. What do the images inside your organisation say about your people?

Do they accurately represent your culture and the reality of your workplace? Or are your internal communication channels clogged with stock photographs (business people shaking hands or holding seedlings anyone? – yep, knew they’d be a few).

neuroI’m a visual thinker and love discovering new images that push my boundaries, challenge my perceptions and make me chuckle.

I use Pinterest extensively for this, particularly via my secret boards, which are my own locked creative space online (read more about how I use it here).

Images can play an important role in enhancing internal communication. They can bring stories to life, are crucial to illustrate ‘real people doing real jobs’ rather than photos that don’t have relevance to your employees, they transform information to be memorable and tap into communication preferences and creativity in our brains.

Bridging the void through art
Today I’m going to share some images with you that are all from the pen of the excellent Hugh MacLeod, who is aka @gapingvoid on Twitter. Hugh is a cartoonist who has been drawing about life and business for 20 years.

Hugh’s blog, gapingvoid has been one of the most popular blogs since the early days of social media, and has developed a loyal following of the best and brightest of Silicon Valley. It remains in the top 20 of the AdAge Power 150 blogs today.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I bought some of his artwork this year as it inspires me, gets my creativity flowing and is great fun to have around.

He recently published an ebook with Brian Solis @briansolis on What if PR stood for people and relationships, and I’ve embedded it below as it’s well worth reading through:

Here are just some of Hugh’s many images and I encourage you to investigate them for yourself – could you use illustrations, quotes, diagrams or cartoons to spice up your internal comms?

I’d love to hear your story if you already are and can share with readers of my blog.

advertising

if-in-doubt-begin

chaos

inspire

Success

Thank you for stopping by,

Rachel

Published 22 October 2014.

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