No, an image is not worth a thousand words. An image always raises a question. An image holds the power of a thousand words, but without them, it is little more than a fleeting moment that soon fades away.
If we look around at our daily lives and think about the things that hold the most significance in our routines, we will recall the images imprinted on our minds—scenes from our tasks and habits. If we attempt to elevate these routines and extract the most remarkable moments, if we try to capture them to communicate their essence, our first instinct is to take a picture and share it in its raw form. We do this constantly through social media.
We build narratives of our lives—or something that resembles them—through images. Yet, often, we realize that these images fail to convey what we expected, or worse, we don’t even recognize ourselves in them. This happens because . our deepest nature, our way of understanding the world, is not visual—it is narrative.
The profession of writing does not immediately come to mind for many as a viable career with economic and professional success. That may be true, but it is equally true that the importance of well-crafted language is gaining traction in the corporate world. Many brands have understood this for a long time and have made it a priority within their companies. Some even go as far as cultivating and developing their own narrative—a story that serves as a vehicle to persuade their teams of the significance and reality of their social and professional roles.
Only structured language can encapsulate a meaningful portion of reality, a fragment we can use to say that one thing represents another. An image without language, on its own, cannot construct a narrative—at most, it can evoke a sensation. The moment we try to interpret it, we need language to build an idea that explains its meaning. This holds true for our personal experiences, but what happens when we apply it to a complex system like the Internet?
It turns out, we get similar results. The information on the web is structured semantically—in other words, it operates through interpretative fields. The fundamental material it is built upon is language. However, at first glance, it may seem that images dominate everything. The reality, though, is that it is language that decides where to place an image, how to display it, when to use it, and who gets to see it. Therefore, mastering language and carefully curating both form and content are crucial. Doing so ensures that the representation of our message aligns as closely as possible with what we want to communicate.
With the rise of social media and the expansion of the “new economy,” images have taken center stage in creative projects—often at the expense of text. We frequently come across visually stunning projects that are devoid of narrative substance. This directly impacts their longevity. It never fails.
Images do not endure unless there is a solid narrative behind them.
We realized this long ago. We noticed it then, and we see it even more clearly now in the increasing demand from our clients for a well-structured message. In the projects we take part in, we emphasize the importance of having a strong, distinct narrative. It is always necessary. Some of the clients we work with have their own agencies or communication departments to handle this aspect. However, many others have never considered this facet of their brand identity and only recognize the issue when it starts affecting their audience’s perception. It is more common than it seems.
To address this challenge, we have trained ourselves from multiple practical perspectives: courses on social media, marketing, textual effectiveness techniques, metadata, and more. We have also taken some enjoyable creative writing workshops, but where we found an invaluable treasure trove of knowledge was in novel-writing workshops.
Ironically, in a time when brevity reigns supreme—where everyone strives to condense their message into a single phrase or just a few words—novels become even more relevant. That is because achieving true conciseness requires drawing from well-established structures, from the deep reservoir of literature that has always shaped human expression with remarkable precision.
There are many outstanding courses in our country, but in our case, we have taken several offered by Hotel Kafka—a true school of ideas. Though it may seem anecdotal, we have discovered an astonishing parallel between novel writing and any communication project. Its structures, techniques, and frameworks provide us with a wealth of resources: time control, narrator selection, point of view, tone…
And when these workshops are led by experienced writers willing to share their journey, in the company of other participants with fascinating projects of their own, the outcome is powerful growth—an evolution in conceptual thinking that elevates us, allowing us to see further, closer to the horizon.
User Experience Personalization
