One of the most bandied about clichés in design, advertising and art is that "a picture says a thousand words."

What we're wondering, however, is -- what's the point of a thousand words?

The Cleartrip user interface is almost entirely bereft of pictures; it is comprised mainly of words. Our primary navigation, for instance, is raw text links. The first link, Flights in India, says everything it needs to say. Nothing more, nothing less and with no room for ambiguity.

Humanized has a great post that explores command line and graphical interfaces and hits the nail on the head:

Command line interfaces are bell-bottom out-of-fashion in the current Web 2.0 boom: I have yet to see an Ajax-enabled glass-reflected command prompt. Let's face it, command line interfaces are extinct to the masses. The GUI dealt the first blow, and now the Web has nailed to coffin on the old style text interface, and it seems to have been a boon for the user. I don't know if I can set up a printer on the command line, but I do know that I don't want to try.

In the run to abandon command line interfaces for the GUI, we've left behind the versatility of language.

I couldn't agree more. The last decade has seen a blind rush towards graphical user interfaces created by unthinking, herd mentality designers. We're losing the ability to use language for what it does best -- communicate.

Language has an immense amount of descriptive power. Pictionary is a game where you try to represent objects, places, and abstract thoughts in pictorial form. It's hard. There is no reverse game.

The power of words is unknown to contemporary designers. They obsess, instead, with icons, decor and fluff.

The icons that Microsoft Word puts in its standard toolbar are a great example of graphics being used as a poor replacement for words. Can you figure out what each of these icons does?

A picture and its thousand words are lovely. But, sometimes, it's more effective to say less. When one word does the trick, you don't need the other 999.