As shown by Fuglesang’s work, some sparks on specific aspects of visual communication and media design were present in the 1980s and 1990s. Notwithstanding these insights, the field of international development for a long time continued to focus on the semiotic point of view, analysing and decoding the ‘language’ of the messages transmitted, and the quest for “systematic study on the evaluation of instructional media took place in different fields. It was in thenext millennium and inspired by the field of the arts that arguments were built toconceive language and text beyond the understanding of visual literacy asopposed to a merely word-based or written language to recognize visual communication and visual languages.