Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Visual Messages
The International Journal of Communication,
Volume 10, 2016 has two insightful pieces for those interested in how
mass audiences are influenced by campaign and news images:
As
noted in the above article and book review, visual shapes illustrate
emotions, and merge with verbal meanings to create a holistic rhetorical
message. Through the manipulation of simple shapes into a typopictorial
design, and consequently the activation of existing mental
associations, logos communicate prosperity, hope, and ideas that are
relevant to people.
Press
photographs have a narrative structure, and are part of an
interactional system involving the relationship between the image,
viewers, and the participants represented in the image. The
compositional system involves framing, salience, and the reading path of
the image.
In this structure, the nucleus includes the heading, the image, and a prosodic tail. The heading often relies on wordplay, calling on experiences of the reader to decode, while the image tends to depict represented participants in an eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing manner. The satellite is the caption text that consists of the experiential orientation and the contextual extension. The experiential orientation functions to clarify and sharpen our understanding of the image, while the contextual extension aims to extend beyond what is needed for readers to understand the image
