Comment by dragonwriter

> Say you are conveying an idea to someone or speaking to a conference - you always try to minimize text and use graphics to illustrate concepts as people tend to understand faster that way.

If you are speaking at a conference or conveying information in an oral presentation, you usually use minimal text and prefer graphics in visual aids because you don't want to engage the linguistic processing parts of the brain on two separate tracks (the verbal content of the oral presentation and the text content of the visual presentation) simultaneously.

This isn't because text is an inferior medium on its own -- which it isn't -- but because its inferior as a simultaneously complement to an oral presentation.