Today’s Plan:
- Making Things is Hard
- Monday Bookmark, Design vs Visual Rhetoric
- Reading Review: WSINYE, chapter 3
- Looking at your Remakes
- Homework
Design vs. Visual Rhetoric
I will often use these terms interchangeably. But I want to open today making a distinction between them. Those who have taken 319, or even 201, with me know that I think the word “rhetoric” has myriad meanings–some more productive than others. “Persuasion” would be rhetoric’s most common definition–but that is a pretty bad definition granted to us by philosophers who believed rhetoric was just a bunch of tricks used to communicate “rationally derived truths” to ignorant audiences (those incapable of deriving said truths the “hard” way). A better understanding of rhetoric is the study of how relations, networks, emotions, and affects influence how we see ourselves, our world, and our possibilities for action. It is as much the study of why persuasion (in the rational model outlined above) *doesn’t* work.
When I talk about visual rhetoric, I am talking about the intentional use of visual elements (pictures, colors, texts, etc) to tell a story and shape the way we think or feel. Their is a distinct purpose, a specific audience, and a strategy to connect the two. In rhetorical terms, I use visual rhetoric to emphasize that inventive purpose-driven process.
Design is also purpose-driven. And designers would argue that the inventive process laid out in the previous paragraph is part of design. That’s fine–I just want to suggest that we think about design more as the technical execution of visual elements. That is, there are rules and expectations for visual genres. Those expectations can radically changeover time. Design, for me in this context, is understanding contemporary aesthetics and expectations. Of course, this is offered more as a thought experiment rather than as a strict distinction.
What triggered this thought experiment? I was going through my visual rhetoric bookmark folder and came across a link to South Dakota’s recent public health campaign. If we are analyzing the advertisement according to H&G’s “Mini-Art School” chapter in WSINYE, then it is extremely well designed. But I think its “rhetorical” success is a lot more complicated to assess.
WSINYE Chapter 3
- When creating a print project, should the headline go over the bottom of an image or under it? [p. 24]
- How do you know when to break a headline? [p. 25]
- How long should a line of text be? [p. 25-26] (let’s look here)
- What do you feel are the most successful elements of your redesign–what about it makes you happy?
- What about it are you the most uncertain–what questions/suspicions do you have?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your redesign?
- Read chapter 5, “Mini Art School.” We can talk about this reading on Friday
- Due Next Monday, February 3rd. A revision of your flyer remake. I will ask you to identify how reading in mini art school directly influenced your revision. Note that your revision can be a complete redesign (but it doesn’t have to be).
- Next week we will be working on resumes. I assume you have a resume somewhere. If you don’t, you can make a copy of this to use as a template. To be ready for next week, you need the information: obviously we will spend more time designing it.
- On Wednesday, we will do a crash course on Photoshop.
Looking at your Remakes
Before we get started, I want you to take a minute to think about three things:
Homework
Three things and fourth thing:
