Small businesses face this choice when trying to promote themselves and their services and products—words or images or both? I’m suggesting that in many circumstances, images (or perhaps images accompanied by some wording) will do a much better job. This shouldn’t come as news to anyone; after all, how often have you heard the old expression “A picture is worth a thousand words”? And, by the way, wouldn’t it make a great tag line for all graphic artists?

Clearly I’m of the opinion that a graphic artist is an indispensable resource for most small businesses (we’ll discuss the few exceptions later). And it’s not only because of the picture-and-thousand-words thing, but also because of another phenomenon in day-to-day business—avoidance of reading whenever possible.

 

Pictures in, paragraphs out

I experienced the people-will-avoid-reading-whenever-possible phenomenon over and over again after I first became aware of it while working for a major oil company, a number of years before becoming a small business owner.