Propaganda and Visual Communication

Today's lecture was pretty interesting. We spent some time looking at War time propaganda and the message that it conveys to the onlooker - hearing everyone's different opinions was very helpful, and it seemed that certain posters were interpreted in various ways, and usually males seemed to think that the message was something else than what the females thought. Simplicity was a major factor in these posters as well, since we looked at first German and Russian propaganda, then British. The British posters were easier to understand (not just because I could understand the language...) as they were mostly simple images of simple things, such as women waving men off to war. The German and Russian posters however were more painterly, with lots of detail and imagery, which in turn made the point less clear and almost gave the onlooker too much to take in. I was really intrigued by this since i have never really given this topic much thought, but British propaganda was very clever. Its simple, easy to understand aesthetics and obvious message worked extremely well when convincing men to join the army and encouraging women to make the most of their time without their husbands/sons etc. So basically, design has to speak to the viewer - if something is confusing or difficult to understand it will not work as well as something which is simple. I had a mixed reaction to this. I don't believe that everything has to be simple to be understood (lets give ourselves some credit) but I definitely do think simplicity appeals to the vast majority of people, purely because they don't have to think about what they are seeing, it can just be taken in and accepted or not accepted, easy as pie.