Abstract
Contracts are fundamental to modern society, yet they are often inaccessible, lengthy, and in-comprehensible, particularly for individuals with low literacy or limited proficiency in the lan-guage of the agreement, a challenge exacerbated in a multilingual country like South Africa. This dissertation investigates visual and comic contracts, which apply the principles of visual legal design, as a transformative solution to the crisis of legal communication in contracts. Rooted in human-centred design, these innovative contractual formats transform dense legal text into engaging visual narratives, enhancing clarity, accessibility, and user understanding. Focusing on South Africa’s unique socio-legal context, the study analyses the ClemenGold Comic Contract for farm workers and lessons from the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd v Dlamini (2013) (1) SA 219 (KZN) to assess the efficacy and legality of this approach. The re-search addresses four central questions: whether comic contracts materially improve compre-hension and participation for vulnerable parties, whether they satisfy South African legal re-quirements for a valid contract, how they are interpreted and enforced by courts, and whether they are legally binding contractual documents. The dissertation concludes that, if carefully designed, visual and comic contracts effectively bridge the communication gap in traditional text-only contracts and aid in comprehension, significantly improving participation and fully meeting the common law and statutory requirements for validity, thereby representing a neces-sary evolution in legal practice that promotes greater access to justice.