How to Create Visual Leverage

How to Create Visual Leverage

Visualize Value is built on a simple conceptual foundation:

If you can explain something visually, you have a much better chance at helping someone understand it.

Below are six practical examples of how you can use visuals to grow your business, convince someone of your talent, and get your point across in the highest possible fidelity.


Make the intangible tangible.

If you sell anything that you can't take a photograph of, consider using simple and precise visuals to make your process visual. 

Visualizing a Service Business

 

Use recognizable symbols.

Use common visual devices to differentiate the differences between you and your competitors. The below example emphasizes both depth of expertise and scale of operation using a simple comparison of three triangles and a descending list of capabilities.

 


Show your process.

A simple technique that explain the level of expertise, time and energy required to do what you do, is to simply record yourself doing it. We use ScreenFlow to capture and edit clips like this.

 

 


Be consistent.

Visual equity compounds. By establishing and sticking to strict visual constraints, you ensure everything you make contributes to your position in minds and subsequently, markets.


Make things look real before they are.

One largely overlooked advantage of visual design is its ability to make something feel real before it reaches its usable form. The benefits of this are obvious and endless. From mocking up physical products, to software interfaces, to renderings of cities.


Use hierarchy to make tedious information readable.

The drier the information, the more of an arbitrage opportunity good design presents. From large datasets to walls of text, introducing typographic hierarchy, color, and dividing lines will drastically widen the number of people that can engage with, and understand your work.

Leverage is as much about where you are standing as how much force you are applying.

If you are building something, it is far more useful to focus on the work you are doing to produce the result than the result itself.

The constraint we apply to package our idea determines their reach & resonance. "Make 1 decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."

Labor is generally a more interchangeable resource than vision.

To help understand this idea, consider the contrast between the two concepts ancient Greeks used to think about time.

It should be relatively simple to identify when we aren't accumulating net new experience, but in practice, it doesn't seem to be.

Language is an incredible tool. It makes it possible for us to externalize what we think and communicate it to others.