Illustration is an art of visual communication. The combination of great artwork and wisely chosen ideas is the formula for an illustrator's success in communicating with pictures.

Pictures play a very important part in our everyday life. Sight is our most widely used sense and as a consequence of this, pictures play a significant role in communication. A picture is neither subtle nor universal enough to take the place of words in the strictest sense of the meaning but that does not mean that pictures do not have their role in communication, and  many pictures do a superior job to words under certain conditions. The underlying problem is that to fulfil this condition, the pictures rely on the diversity of language and words to secure their meaning.

Gombrich, in his book Art and Illusion highlighted the biggest problem of communicating with pictures, and that is their inaccuracy. His claim is that the artist is psychologically susceptible to his own interpretation of the object he depicts. He sees where the lines are to be drawn and he makes the object conform to his own imagined stereotype. An artist learns a schemata and a set of patterns when he learns to draw and these will always, in the first instance, direct him to draw to those particular patterns and classifications. As Gombrich says the `will-to- form' is rather a `will-to- conform', and ensure that the assimilation of any new shape conforms to the schemata and patterns an artist has learned to handle. The truth is twisted to fit the stereotype and the outcome not always the accurate representation of the object. With this being the case, it is hard to argue that pictures can accurately replace words. Words are specifically designed to convey accurate descriptions and meanings, whereas pictures are subjective and their accuracy is at the mercy of the interpreter.

Pictures are also only useful as a reminder of a frozen moment in time. A photograph of someone, is very quickly out of date, whereas language changes to suit time. A name can quite easily flash a better and more accurate image of the subject in the recipients mind, whereas a picture does no such thing. The importance of language is that it is communicable. Naming someone provokes a better image than an old photograph does and is just as instantaneous. The key to language lies in its wonderful subtlety and diversity. Picture communication can never say as much. Language is designed specifically with the purpose of communicating, whereas pictures are not. It is only because of spoken and written words, that man has progressed.  Speech can be wonderfully diverse, but at the same time, its effectiveness lies in its economical use. Through language we can form relationships and communicate in other forms.

According to this argument, pictures came after language because they needed vocabulary to find a purpose in communication.

Thoughts without a language are not truly thoughts, because they need language to define themselves. Helen Keller in her autobiography, remarked upon this, when she first realised the significance of language. When one day the word `water' was spelt out in her hand, while at the same time a cool stream was gushing over her other hand, the world of language was opened up to her. "...Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten -a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me...That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!...Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought." It is easy to forget the significance of language. Real thinking, is only possible when we have the language there to convey it. `Water' for Helen Keller was no longer just an object of sense perception, it had a name that could be mentioned, conceived, remembered.

Pictures only offer confusion unless they are qualified by language. To be able to communicate effectively the meaning of the picture, you have to place it in context. Whether this be a phrase on the picture saying; `danger', `vote Labour', or `support Manchester United' or just putting the picture in the place or the time, or next to the article that makes it relevant.  We have passport photos and not composed paragraphs because it is a better form of communication under the circumstances. Pictures add sparkle and colour to our life, but their use is entirely dependent on language.

The joy and necessity of language was wonderfully captured by Helen Keller, and just as the world would be a more insipid place without pictures it would be even more so without language. The creativity of words in poetry, novels and public speaking is sometimes harder, and less exciting, to reflect in pictures.   Pictures have their place, they can convey messages quicker and make life easier and more exciting, but they are ultimately dependent on the social conditions created through language.

The Greeks copied the innovative Phoenician alphabet because pictograms and ideograms were limited in what they could represent. It is said that their famous historian, Herodotus, recorded a disastrous event that came from misinterpreting pictograms. A general received a scroll with pictures of a bird, a frog, and several arrows on it. The pictures intrigued him, but he was too proud to admit that he couldn't figure out what the message meant. He studied the scroll all night. In the morning, the general told his officers that the scroll meant the enemy was surrendering to them! The officers patted themselves on the back and congratulated each other on their victory. However, the poor, sleep-deprived general had made a deadly mistake. The pictures meant that the enemy would attack them and that they should prepare to surrender! The Greeks learned the lesson that communicating with pictures was unreliable. They needed a better system.

Cave paintings and representational carvings define the beginnings of "external long-  term storage" of information. External storage has several qualities of interest.

Before children learn to read and write, they do not know the difference between a line drawing and a letter. When an adult writes an 'A,' it is simply another drawing. It is a picture, different than a face or a house, but it is still just another image drawn with a colored pencil on while paper. Soon children learn that combinations of these letter- pictures mean more complicated things. When the drawings 'A-P-P-L-E' are combined, they form another picture which we learn stands for the name of the fruit. Now the letter- pictures become word-pictures that can spark other images in our minds of the thing they stand for. We further learn that these word- pictures can be combined with other word-pictures to form sentence-pictures. To a child, there is no difference between words and pictures --  they are one and the same.

It is not clear how much thinking skills are helped by early drawing, or how much knowledge is conveyed. Communicating via pictures is potentially powerful, but would have been labourious with early materials, and not very portable. However, it seems likely that early drawing, combined with the communications abilities refined through use of speech, must have played a role in the development of early pictorial written languages.

When you carefully analyze a visual message, you consciously study each visual symbol within that picture's frame. The act of concentration is a verbal exercise. Without verbal translations of the signs within an image, there is little chance of it being recalled in the future. The picture is lost from your memory because you have learned nothing from it. Images become real property of the mind and remembered only when language expresses them. Linguistic experts do not need to argue that images have no alphabet or syntax because such assertions are true. The alphabet and the syntax of images reside in the mind, not in the picture itself.

There are strong indications that the status of images in mass communication is increasing. We live in a mediated blitz of images. They fill our newspapers, magazines, books, clothing, billboards, computer monitors and television screens as never before in the history of mass communications. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished, not through reading words, but by reading images. Philosopher Hanno Hardt warns that the television culture is replacing words as the important factor in social communication. Shortly, words will be reserved for only bureaucratic transactions through business forms and in books that will only be read by a few individuals. On the human law of 'minimum effort', reading is losing ground to watching because viewing requires little mental processing.