Every image signals to consumers whether or not your brand is especially for them. Open up an L.L. Bean catalog and you’ll be struck with images of outdoor and indoor tranquility, with products on old, wooden docks, people engaging in dialogue by a lake, sitting on rocking chairs looking out at the trees, or indoors by a roaring fire with a yellow Labrador Retriever nestled on his bed. If you don’t have an affinity to nature, hiking, and quietude, these images probably won’t speak to you. If you do have a love for what this imagery represents, you may dive into their seasonal catalogs with joy and excitement.
Why do images have so much power? Our logos and marks are symbols. Symbols are triggers of archetypal images—energy patterns that rest in the unconscious. These primordial images are not personal to each individual, but are aspects of the “collective” of all of us. Eminent Swiss psychoanalyst Dr. Carl Jung highlighted that these archetypal images are the building blocks of thought. These unconscious, archetypal images lay the foundation for the experience customers are going to have with your brand. The images you create in your logos and marks—the symbols—are a signal to the customer of what the brand represents.
So with my original approach, what it seems I am achieving, according to Bueno/Jung's theory, is stripping away all of the imagery, getting rid of all of the filler lines, needless anecdotes and untranslatable pieces of text, and saying "This is what the author wants you to see." It is then up to the audience to determine whether or not the review works as a review, and ultimately whether or not the music is to their taste. The immediacy of using images instead of text in a context like this is interesting to me; it cuts a lot of time out of reading a 750 word review when within a few seconds, you could say 'the picture this review paints is quite bleak/dark/not to my taste.' All text-based reviews strive to do is paint a visual image of audio. Why not just cut straight to the visualisation instead of re-interpreting an interpretation? I am not saying the medium is better, necessarily, I just want to see if it works as a replacement.
I think in my work so far, using the M83 piece as an example, the 'branding' as such is within each individual image that makes the collage. The background I used was an image of the Joshua Tree desert; so if you read that as thinking there is a specific reason the artist must have decided to record there, this may be a key aspect. There is a visual interpretation of the quote "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye" - which again sets the kind of tone the author thinks the record conveys - in my work, I think the inclusion of the heart and eye metaphor will clearly state that this isn't going to be a death metal record about going on a murderous rampage or whatever. Each part can be dissected and overall, I think the impression the viewer will get between the image and the text is fairly similar. I think the project will work out well; but all of these attempts at reimagining it aren't really working for me, to be honest.
Bueno sums up what it is I'm trying to achieve when saying 'These primordial images are not personal to each individual, but are aspects of the “collective” of all of us.' - I know the specific images I have chosen to convey my work on the collages is 'individual' or subjective, but I am trying to use the imagery in an indexical manner. I just want the viewer to acknowledge what the image is 'saying,' not whether it looks pretty or not. Whether it is better suited to do that with some kind of visual dictionary is neither here nor there. I think it would still achieve roughly the same thing. I either interpret reviews as they are written, as accurately as possible, or I listen to an album and simply list all the elements of each song with some kind of Isotype I have created myself, one for 'loud guitars,' one for 'male vocals' or whatever, but then how is that any better than what I have created already? So much to think about.
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