A blink. That’s all it takes for a reader to decide whether it’s worth the effort. And sadly, more and more readers are deciding it’s not. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in Blink (a book that millions of people did read), we subconsciously use our life experience and perception to decide in an instant whether something is irresistible or boring. Our brains filter and make decisions based on visual and other sensual clues long before our conscious logic processes kick in. Most communication today fails because it is highly resistible. Our subconscious decides that it is inauthentic, dishonest or incompetent in a tiny fraction of the time it would take to read and analyse the whole thing.

So there's a big elephant in the room, and he's getting a bit cranky about being ignored. The elephant is the fact that we live in an incredibly visual society. But most publishers think they are in a words game. In the age of visual language, most of what we see is equivalent to baby talk.

Successful communication is all about ensuring the first instant is compelling, intriguing and rewarding. The visual is the key. The visual provides the opportunity to identify or to differentiate, to provoke or to reassure. In short, to say “I’m interesting”. As Alain de Botton says in his book The Architecture of Happiness: “There’s a lot more to the visual than just the visual”.

To translate a brief and harness the power of the visual is what many of our projects are about.

When we worked with the South China Morning Post, our brief was simply to re-assert the authority of the newspaper. A small brief for a big project, it was a fundamentally visual undertaking, and took us right back to the architecture of the newspaper. We wanted to reflect the intelligence of the paper by making the page designs and philosophy of layout far more organised and sytematic. We worked hard to select the right family of fonts, and customise them (with the help of the font designer Christian Schwartz) to help position the newspaper in a precise, intelligent way. We worked closely with the production editors to create stylish, contemporary ways of telling stories that are easy and quick to comprehend. And easy and quick to produce. All of the design efforts were aimed at helping the South China Morning Post to build a repeatable, sophisticated newspaper that reflected the quality of journalism it had built its reputation on. The readers and the staff appreciated the newfound respect for each other. The most common remark we heard was along the lines of 'Fabulous, it was about time.'

The newspaper went on to win numerous design awards.