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The present contribution examines how the current trend in advertising towards more pictures and less text affects the linking of language and image. Investigations on a larger corpus (1.100 worldwide ads) are to substantiate the hypotheses that in this situation pictorial functions and linkage types diversify and language – even though quantitatively reduced – reclaims a pivotal part in making and managing meaning. After a brief consideration of multimodality and the semiotic and cognitive mode differences between language and image the article outlines a model which sets out to explain how recipients understand the kind of minimalist ads now in fashion. It rests on three interconnected tiers: recipients need to resolve indirectness (implicatures), trace secondary meanings of signs (connotations) and follow the networking of concepts (metaphor/metonymy). The contribution then reviews approaches to the analysis and typology of language-image-links since Barthes’ first attempt (1977) and suggests that a complex methodology would need to take into account spatial syntax, inter-modal coherence, rhetorical-logical semantics and pragmatic functions between language and image. Using corpus evidence the article explains and illustrates five currently common textual patterns of linking image and language, which are based on pictorial functions and logical semantic ties. Pictures may engage the recipient in the very process of vision, they promote the management of concepts and reduce complexity, set up all kinds of semantic games that delay decoding and provoke the recipient by transgressing norms. Writing may also emulate pictures through typography and layout.