Today was our first proper lecture from Fred starting with the topic of visual communication and visual literacy. I'd never really contemplated either of these things before but oddly have been using these things all my life. Visual communication is the process of sending and receiving messages through the use of type and images which is something that serves as a cornerstone of illustration. These messages are sent and received using a shared understanding of symbols, signs, gestures and objects and can be affected by many things such as the audience receiving the messages, the context we see the messages, the media and the method in which the messages are distributed.
We then went on to learn that visual communication is driven by visual literacy which is our ability to construct certain meanings from image and type. As the images we are trying to understand can be from the past, the present, different cultures and countries we need to have at minimum a base understanding of these things which directly informs our visual literacy. As creators we also need to be able to effectively communicate a message to an audience which can be easily understood and in turn appreciated.
To help give us more context about visual literacy, we then learnt about the principles of the subject. Principle one references our ability to interpret the things were seeing, negotiate them and then make meaning from them, which it turns out is something we all do every day without realising. For instance when were in a foreign country and we see signs with a man and a woman on them, we know that we will soon be entering gendered toilets. Interestingly though, these signs are never hyper-realistic, often only showing a blue curved line for a man and a pink line for a woman. Usually though we still understand this and its fascinating to question whether we do this through a sophisticated level of learnt global communication or whether its something that through social conditioning we've just learnt to come to expect.
Principle two is based on the idea that images can be read just like words in a book, for example, medical instructions or the ikea manual. You are able to see outlines of how many pills to take, and at which times of the day, and who is not suitable to take the pills e.g. children, and from this you know the doctor recommended way to take your medication via a common set of symbols. This can be essential again in foreign countries or simply to quickly understand things is perhaps your literacy skills are lower than your visual skills.
Principle three references presentational symbols which exist in a certain context, which by adding or taking away the context then directly affects our ability to read and understand them. The conventions of visual communication are combined with cultural and societal elements which give them context. So for instance when you see just a + symbol on its own, to many different people it could mean 100 different things such as church, religion, add symbol, medical, but when combined with the context of =, we start to see that + = together makes reference to the mathematic signs add and equals. Put simply, the same signs can mean different things depending on the context, environment and the associative meanings of these things.
Principle 4 says that in order for any language to exist, all that is necessary is an agreement amongst a group of people the one thing stands for another. This involves something that I'd never come across before called visual semantics. This focuses on the relationship between a symbol and what it stands for, for example the 'I heart NY' slogans. Over time its become accepted that the symbol of a heart can stand for the word love (in the right context) and that the abbreviation NY stands for New York. This understanding changes a jumble off random letters into a very marketable slogan, through its history and its culture.
Principle 5 means that being visually literate requires awareness of the relationship between visual syntax (another new word) which basically means the structure and organisation of certain elements in an image to affect the way we read it e.g. framing, scale, colour, texture, saturation, scale. You can see through examples of images of the cooked breakfast that Fred showed us where one is beautifully presented and the other in zoomed in at an angle and is darker in colour and more textural, how even if an image is made up of the same elements it can appear different thanks to the minute details which connote certain ideas or feelings. This is something I now know I can apply to my work to make it more visually appealing or to garner a reaction from people.
Under the same umbrella was visual semantics which is how the image fits within its context and how we read it based on where it is, cultural, social and historical elements. This I guess refers a lot to our audience and that we must make sure when producing work that the visual semantics are fitting to our intended audience, e.g. not referencing old 70's shows in projects that are intended for children to understand.
We briefly touched on the theme of semiotics which is something that really confuses me but is essentially the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy and metaphor. It fits in with the study of linguistics and I think this is important for us to know about and understand how certain signs we may use in our work can be ready by people and how we can use them in the most effective way.
The most interesting part of the lecture for me was the part near the end when we touched on symbols, signs and signifiers which was one of the few things I'd heard of briefly before. As an example of this (so I don't forget) is if we were talking about Dominoes pizza, the symbol or their logo would be a blue and red domino, the sign so their identity is pizza and side dishes to deliver or order, and the signifier or the brand would be delicious pizza, cheese and good service. This is important for us to be able to identify what certain companies values and impacts on society are so that we reference their signs in our work, we know what people think they can expect from it.
In a similar vein we talked about how this would apply to New York. If you see the statue of liberty, a yellow cab and a big apple together then you can pretty safely assume that New York is being referenced, however none of these things really specifically apply to that city alone and nothing else. The statue of liberty is a visual synecdoche, which is when a part is used to represent the whole. However this is only an effective technique if the image is universally recognised. The yellow cab is used as a visual metonym, or a symbolic image used to make reference to something with a more literal meaning. And the apple is a visual metaphor which is used to transfer the meaning from one image to another. Although the two things may have no close relation, a metaphor conveys an impression about something relatively unfamiliar comparing and associating it with something more familiar to the viewer.
This could help us when dealing with different kinds of client bases to help certain people feel like what might be a more unsavoury or difficult subject is somehow more easily accessible.
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