Abstraction

Abstraction, however, need have no relationship to actual symbol-making when symbols have meaning only because it is pinned on them. The reduction of all we see to the basic visual elements is also a process of abstraction which, in fact, has far more significance to the understanding and structuring of visual messages. The more representational the visual information, the more specific its reference; the more abstract, the more general and all-encompassing it is.

Abstraction, visually, is simplification toward a more intense and distilled meaning. Human perception strips away surface detail in response to the need to establish balance and other visual rationalisations. But the importance to meaning does not end there. Abstraction can exist in visual matters not only in the purity of a visual statement stripped down to minimal representational information but also as pure abstraction, which draws no connection with familiar visual date, environmental or experiential.

Abstraction is the primary tool in the development of a visual plan. It is most useful in the process of uncommitted exploration of a problem and development of visible options and solutions. The nature of abstraction releases the visualizer from the demands of representing the finished final solution, and so allows the underlying structural forces of the compositional questions to surface, the pure visual elements to appear, and the techniques to be applied with direct experimentation.

It is a dynamic process filled with starts and false starts but free and easy by nature.