What Makes an Iconic Image

In today’s age of information overload, the battle for companies, brands and PR professionals to get their ‘messages’ noticed, understood and retained is greater than ever before. And we’ve always been a strong advocate of using pictures to enhance reports, articles, news releases and presentations. When words, images and color are used together correctly – they can be a very persuasive communication mix.

With this in mind, we wanted to share a very thoughtful piece written by Martin Kemp for the Wall Street Journal’s blog on the making of an iconic image.

“There is no necessary set of clearly defined factors that are infallibly shared by all iconic images.

However, there are tendencies that are recurrent to varying degrees in various permutations. Some are concerned predominantly with meaning; a simplicity of message that is at once definitive and compelling but that is also open to a broad, rich, and varied series of associations; the ability to work with both generic and specific meanings; an openness to varied kinds of individual and collective engagement; a special interplay with shared human values; the focus of devotional or cult practice; the forging of collective identity.

And there are recurrent but not invariable visual characteristics: a sense of visual presence that implies something beyond its material existence; a measure of symmetry or of a carefully weighted asymmetrical balance; memorable simplicity at the heart of the image; tonal and coloristic clarity; robustness in the face of degraded reproduction; making good repeats, as if in a wallpaper pattern; recognition even in fragmentary form.

We can think of icons that do not obey all these rules. And exploiting all of them is not a guarantee of success.” Kemp is author of “Christ to Coke, How image Becomes Icon”.