Why Illustrations Aid Understanding
A small collection of illustrations is provided to show some of the diverse ways illustration may aid understanding. The display of parts and assemblies often relies on techniques such as explosions...
View Articletypographic
An interactive experience informed by type and typography, which aims to illustrate the depth and import of type, and to raise relevant questions about how typography is treated in the digital media,...
View ArticleThe Design of World Wide Web Home Pages: Using Visuals to Establish...
The World Wide Web presents information developers with the task of designing texts that will be accessed by multiple, global audiences. At the same time, Web technologypresents developers with new...
View ArticleTalking with Virginia Postrel
Postrel's new book, The Substance of Style, explores the economic, cultural, social, personal, and political implications of the growing importance of aesthetics in business and society.
View ArticleTowards a Rhetoric of Tactile Pictures
This paper offers a first step towards a rhetoric of tactile pictures by applying the visual framework developed by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen to a tactile alphabet book. After a brief review...
View ArticlePresentaciones Conceptuales
Las presentaciones tienden a ser más visuales y menos textuales. Convertir cada concepto en una imagen es el reto y, a la vez, la solución.
View ArticleVisual Literacy Crash Course
Today, communication requires more than just pages of printed words. Producing effective documents and training requires the ability to understand, think, and communicate graphically-to be visually...
View ArticleThe Successes and Challenges of Visual Language
Discusses efforts to create manuals that rely entirely on pictures for communication.
View ArticleHow to Use Images to Convey Themes
Advances in technology have democratized the processof illustrating documents such as brochures, reports, andwebsites. With digital cameras, scanners, and a widevariety of stock illustrations...
View ArticleVisible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization
Visual designers working on the web need an understanding of the medium in which they work, so many have taken to code. Many have entered the usability lab. But what about the other side? Are...
View ArticleIdentity in Sheep's Clothing
Can an identity exude moral or ethical attitudes? In the past, product and business identities that functioned well were bound to a person or family that over long periods delivered quality and...
View ArticleCommunication as Participation
A discussion of the relationship between visual language and participation is important in light of globalization and the homogenization of the visual landscape, forces that breed marginalization and...
View ArticleAttributing Meaning to Corporate Logos: A Cross Cultural Comparison
Visual symbols are an essential part of corporate communication. The development of an appropriate corporate logo is an expensive and a time-intensive process. This study examines the meaning of visual...
View ArticleSay it in Pictures: Visual Literacy for Business and Technical Communication
Today’s communication media demand more than just words. Producing effective documents, training materials, and Web pages requires the ability to understand, think, and communicate graphically' to be...
View ArticleVerbalizing About the Visual: Visual Analysis Tools for Design Evaluation and...
While technical communicators are increasingly involved in visual design, they frequently have difficulty communicating verbally about the visual, and, therefore, contributing effectively to design...
View ArticleVisual Rhetoric (and Other Visual) Resources
Links to a variety of resources about visual rhetoric.
View ArticleAn Introduction to Visualisation
Visualising things makes them tangible and brings them into shareable form. Visualisation brings ideas to life and helps understanding. Visualisation techniques help elicit, communicate and analyse...
View ArticleHow to Find the Perfect Color
Getting that just-right color is part art, part science. We'll show you.
View ArticleGraphic Design
Graphic design is everywhere, in every product, package, poster, and product of the modern world. Although the graphic design discipline was created less than a century ago, the world has since come to...
View ArticleThe Sound and Motion of Color
Can sound and motion illustrate the personality of color? The Animation class at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design set out to discover the answer.
View Articleviz.
The goal of this site is to explore the ways in which rhetoric, visual culture, and pedagogy interact with and inform each other. In keeping with this mission, the viz. blog is a forum for exploring...
View ArticleTheories of Visual Rhetoric: Looking At The Human Genome
For too long, journal articles and textbooks on scientific and technical discourse have adopted a positivistic approach to visuals. Unfortunately, this approach is problematic. It ignores that visuals...
View ArticleSome Graphic and Semigraphic Displays
Graphs and semigraphic displays are made for purposes. Different purposes usually call for different graphs.
View ArticleMaking the Strange Familiar: A Pedagogical Exploration of Visual Thinking
Scholarly conversation within the field of professional communication increasingly has focused on the practice, research, and pedagogy of visual rhetoric. Yet, visual thinking has received relatively...
View ArticleNational Pride, Global Capital: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Transnational...
In this article we examine 561 different airline tailfin designs as a visual genre, revealing how the global-local binary may be managed and realized semiotically. Our analysis is organized into three...
View ArticleLondon Through Rose-Colored Graphics: Visual Rhetoric and Information Graphic...
In this article, I examine a historical information graphic--Charles Booth's maps of London poverty (1889-1902)--to analyze the cultural basis of ideas of transparency and clarity in information...
View ArticleSeven Things You Should Know About Data Visualization
Data visualization is the graphical representation of information. Information technology combines the principles of visualization with powerful applications and large data sets to create sophisticated...
View ArticleTypographical Design, Modernist Aesthetics, and Professional Communication
The technology of in-house publishing is radically shifting the responsibility for document design from the graphic specialist to the individual writer. To apply the new technology, professional...
View ArticleSeeing is Believing: Communicating Information Graphically
Diverse work situations and varied skills, abilities, and motivation affect how users handle documentation to do their jobs. Communicating graphically challenges the communicator to 1) select...
View ArticleDesign is Function
Good design, like good writing or editing, cart make or break a technical publication. Even if you know little about design us a discipline, as a technical communicator you employ it in every...
View ArticleLiterature Review: What is Visual Literacy?
This paper takes a look at what is being said in various disciplines (technical writing, journalism, education, psychology, user interface design, and visual arts) in an attempt to answer the question...
View ArticleEffective Technical Graphics
This presentation examines ineffective technical graphics with problems in simplicity, orientation, and scale. It identifies principles of effective graphic communication that could prevent such...
View ArticleCreating Appropriate Graphics for Business Situations
Charts and graphs are ubiquitous in business documents, and most students in my business communication courses are well aware that they need to be able to create many different types of data...
View ArticleNewspaper Design as Cultural Change
his article describes the (re-)design of newspapers and magazines as a process of cultural change which goes beyond designing a publication's layout, typography and use of colour, and includes...
View ArticleDigital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory
Taking photographs seems no longer primarily an act of memory intended to safeguard a family's pictorial heritage, but is increasingly becoming a tool for an individual's identity formation and...
View ArticleVisually Speaking: Adult-Only Publications
Corporate photography was once the realm of adults only. Just a few years ago, it was surprising to see a picture of anybody under 40 years old in an annual report or capabilities brochure, much less...
View ArticleStorytelling Photos
Anyone can relate the facts of an event, just like anyone can hold a camera up to a scene and document it. But bare facts and badly composed images make for poor communication. It takes skill and...
View ArticleBeing Good for Goodness' Sake: Corporate Social Responsibility Imagery
It sees you when you’re sleeping. It knows if you’re awake. 'It' is the world, and it knows if your company has been naughty or nice. The digital revolution has put a photographic device, be it a...
View ArticleI Love Typography
iLT is designed to inspire its readers, to make people more aware of the typography that is around them. We really cannot escape typography; it's everywhere: on road signs, shampoo bottles, toothpaste,...
View ArticleStepping into Oz: Managing and Delivering Successful Visual Design
How can design teams get to a successful visual design with their clients? Getting to the right visual design can be the trickiest part of a design project. One of the key reasons is that some clients...
View ArticleWhy 2007 I.P.C.C. Report Lacked ‘Embers’
Several authors of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the projected effects of global warming now say they regret not pushing harder to include an updated diagram of...
View ArticleA Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
An interactive presentation of a variety of visualization techniques used by graphic designers, technical illustrators and document designers to convey information.
View ArticleSixteen Usable CSS Graph and Bar Chart Tutorials and Techniques
Have you ever even tried to create your own CSS graph? If you have, you will know how hard it is. Using Flash is one way to go, but you just can’t beat a beautifully crafted CSS Graph. Have a look at...
View ArticleTrouble-Free Color Palettes: Transform
As the internet and television bring us instant information and access to millions of resources worldwide—some more trustworthy than others—separating fact from fiction requires a bit of skill ... and...
View ArticleEleven Ways to Use Images Poorly in Slides
As digital cameras have become ubiquitous, and cheap (or free) photo websites plentiful, more people than ever are using images in presentations. Images are not appropriate for every kind of talk, but...
View ArticleCopywriting or Design: Which Gets the Best Results?
Designers believe that if something isn’t working well, and it comes down to changing the copy or the design, it’s always the copy that should be changed, reduced or sometimes nearly completely...
View ArticleThe Social Life of Visualization: Part 1
In 2009 we are in the midst of an interesting era for data visualization, particularly as it becomes coupled with the social web. Increasing processing speed, bandwidth and storage capacity are making...
View ArticleVisual Design for the Non-Designer
What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about...
View Article"Not Just a Colour:" Pink as a Gender and Sexuality Marker in Visual...
This article investigates the functions of the colour pink as a marker of gender and sexuality in cultural models and the multimodal texts they inform. To this end, tendencies suggested by a pilot...
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