We all know men of few words, but Bill was a man of none.

We met during my first week in advertising, when our creative director paired me with Bill, eight years my senior, to create a campaign for breakfasts at McDonald's.

I soon learned, primarily through telepathy, that our approach to brainstorming would be to write headlines with bold black Sharpies on sheets of yellow legal paper and spread those sheets across the floor between our two chairs in Bill's office. Then we would sit. Our entire bodies would sit, only our eyes moving just enough to take in each idea. The deferential rookie, I waited for Bill to speak.

Five minutes would pass. Then a word, perhaps. No, just "Hmm." After 20 minutes, a verdict from Bill. "Let's do this." And we would.

I calculated that dinner with Calvin Coolidge, Ben Hogan and Bill would produce four words: "Pass the salt" and "Thanks," and that I would not be able to block out the sound of a clock ticking in the next room.

A month later we created a campaign for CBS's affiliate in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The afternoon before their executives and consultants were flying in for our presentation, I suggested that -- given my month in advertising and Bill's decade (not to mention my face, which, at age 31 was still keeping me out of bars unless I had my Minnesota driver's license) -- Bill should present the campaign.

"You do it," he said -- as always, in the fewest words possible to convey his meaning.

Bill spoke less often than most art directors, but was hardly unique in his field. From early childhood, art directors and designers like him display their talent for the visual. But because so many are like him, theirs are not the quiet voices in business today, but the silent ones. And we all suffer for it.

We suffer through bad design, garish design, superfluous design. We endure pollution of color combinations that do not combine, masses of words screaming at the same piercing volume for our attentions, design for no one's sake and everyone's misery. We suffer because too few people know enough to know they must care -- and so the amateurs, the beginners and the shingle-hangers work too much, and the professionals too little.

Design is frosting, too many managers and owners think. But how can anyone ignore Apple's success -- and Dell's demise? How can they not think design not only figured in their shift of fortunes, but may have explained them? How can anyone ignore the Dyson vacuum cleaner and the Viper, or as a seemingly mundane example, St. Louis's Gateway Arch?

At the age when they are wordless, babies shown a dozen photos will stare longest at the pictures of the most attractive people. From birth we are hard-wired for beauty and biased, as part of that, to simplicity and clarity. A complex face may suggest character to us, but a simpler and perfectly symmetrical one engages us.

The brief for the vital role of design goes on for pages, but the advocates for the case argue best with images, not words -- and business forever has been dominated by the wordsmiths. The usually tall (the taller you are, the higher your starting salary in business) and handsome executive makes an articulate case for proposition A, and his Alpha status all but ensures that his direction is followed.

We believe images -- seeing is believing, after all, and "I see" means "I understand" -- but in business, we follow the words. We mistake articulateness for wisdom, and silence for a lack of confidence, and so the few words of the few designers are lost.

On this point, I received a call almost a year go. The owner of the chain of Pilgrim Dry Cleaners told me she had read my books, and hoped I might come speak at her company. The next day I drove to her northern suburb location, skeptical that her budget and my invoices could ever agree, but eager to hear directly from a fan. We spoke for 25 minutes and toured her headquarters, during which we found points of common ground, at least one of which explained her interest in me.

Since taking over the company two years earlier, she had seen over 20 percent annual growth, a surprise in a mature and crowded market. Had she increased advertising, tried couponing, or perhaps launched a campaign based on "greener dry cleaning"? What had she done?

"We just changed the logo," she said. She updated it and made it look more polished and -- a telling word -- "cleaner."

That was it? "Can't think of anything else…it seemed to change everything. Just as your books suggested it might."

My books have tried to do what Bill could not or would not: make the case for the visual. We buy with our eyes, just as we choose the orangest orange and the tallest and handsomest -- the most "CEO-looking" -- person to run a company…a person who subsequently, unaware of the irony, tells us that appearances don't matter.

Many years ago I entered marketing convinced that it was words that mattered, and mine would make the rational case for motorcycles, motor homes and television networks, and sell them. But in the years that followed I've learned that most words had been ruined, and by my profession.

As one example, advertising has ruined most adjectives. We no longer can say unique, which used to mean "one-of-a-kind." We now must say "most unique," and then "truly the most unique" -- suggesting that merely being one-of-a-kind is common. "Special" has lost its meaning, except to suggest "not that special after all," and has been replaced by "extraordinary," and of course "truly extraordinary" -- thus reminding us that most claims of extraordinary are untrue. Today, four of every five movies claim to be extraordinary, which means that ordinary is uncommon and extraordinary is everywhere. Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where everything is well above average.

And so, as my hero Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said, it goes. Language shrivels from all that abuse, and we're left to mistrust it, and trust only our eyes. That is the way to the modern heart; through the eyes. In a world of commodities -- where even the commonplace is deemed exceptional and where distrust of advertising has become so great that Dilbert can riff on it for weeks and still make readers cackle with delight -- design has become among the last tools for achieving competitive distinction.

Just give them a computer interface, they thought -- and so Dell and others gave us words and offered us the mess called Vista. (Wow! Microsoft promised, and Wow, not surprisingly, it wasn't.) Apple gave us Jaguar, Aqua, icons and a reminder that great design makes our lives easier, if only by making images clearer and more communicative. And now the most ardent Microsoft devotees are moving in remarkable number to Apple, confessing en route that for all those years, they were swallowing the Kool-Aid.

And the visual triumphs, as it will continue to, even while the art directors and designers remain what most are: people of images, making the world simpler, more beautiful, more functional, more utterly livable.

The next chance you get, speak out for them and what they do. They need us, and heaven forbid, we desperately need them.

A driver in India replaces his horn several years before he first replaces his brakes. You learn why on a drive from Bangalore to Mysore; over a 70-mile stretch in the middle of that 110-mile trek, our driver bleated over 1,200 times -- one, two or three beeps at a time. There appeared to be a code involved here, with one meaning "Thanks," two meaning "Please move" and three perhaps meaning, "Move, you idiot!" Afterwards we wondered about carpal tunnel syndrome amongst these Indian drivers, but quickly realized the subject was moot: death certainly afflicts Indian drivers years before carpal tunnel syndrome ever could.

New York cabbies should venture to India and book such a trip. Within minutes, a cabbie would feel like a champion city club golfer would after just one hole with Tiger Woods, or how most professional guitarists felt the first time they heard Jimi Hendrix.

Nothing that Americans experience at home resembles driving in India. The closest approximations would be Chuck Jones' cartoon renderings of the Tasmanian Devil or the final screen on the video game Asteroids, when the asteroids descend at such a pace that your only hope is to delay, for seconds, your implosion.

When you arrive at your destination in Mysore, you exit the car and survey it, certain it must be pocked with gouges the width of golf balls. But the sides gleam, buffed like expensive new shoes, fault-free. Only the Taj Mahal is a greater miracle -- that, and that no one was killed on the road to Mysore that day.

We are so grateful again to the hundreds of people we met in India. During the second of the day-long seminars I delivered there, I commented on the irony that I had spent 90 minutes lecturing them on relating well to others. "Why am I telling you? You should be in our country, telling us!"

I was reminded of the special graciousness of the people here when we reached the exit of Mumbai Airport. There through the window, just outside in a crowd of hundreds, was my host, Raghoo, waving eagerly, and there in his arms was an enormous garland of flowers -- matched by a another in the arms of his assistant.

It recalled my first visit there and a lecture at Amity University School of Business, where I entered the foyer to see spelled out in the floor my name, the covers of my books, and my likeness -- all created as a collage of tiny fingernail-sized flower blooms. Later, I was given a large jade model of the Taj Mahal, a crystal rose, the official hats and ties of the school, these massive garlands of gladiolas and, I confess, some gifts that are hard to recall among so many.

Yet there I am back in India, telling Indians about the importance of the welcome, and how it changes an experience. Indeed it does, because a week later, I still think first of their graciousness.

Christine's vivid memory is of their poverty. It is easy to return from there and decide that by any reasonable comparison, America has no poverty. The poor in America often own homes and usually own two cars. In America, the poor have cable. In India, they have a shack made of plastic, one change of clothes, and some of their teeth. America has shelters; Indians have only their will and their wits.

But amidst all this, and perhaps partly because of it, it is hard to imagine a more compelling place, and impossible to name a more gracious people. A trip to India does what travel does at its best: it changes the way you see.