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Designing Visual Languages Strategies for Professional Communicators 1997 Complementary Texts Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen Keywords Copyright © 2007 Isabel Pedersen |
Designing Visual Language is organized into 4 parts and 10 chapters. Kostelnick and Roberts focus upon the visual within the written mode. They are concerned with the visual nature of written text, the visual components that accompany text and the ways in which a document operates as a visual entity as a whole. They do touch on online media, but not in a thorough way. They introduce their core vocabulary early in the work. They use a set of key terms, or cognates, to discuss the bulk of examples throughout, which are Arrangement, Emphasis, Clarity, Conciseness, Tone and Ethos. Perception is also important for visual language. It is not confined to the senses, but it also entails various kinds of thinking. Kostelnick draws on two Gestalt principles, figure-ground and grouping, and demonstrates how knowledge of them is useful to designers. They do not go to the extent that Karen Schriver does in her book Dynamics in Document Design (1997) with describing gestalt principles, but their discussion is meaningful. Kostelnick and Roberts move through the book analyzing four areas of visual language. · Intra level design concerns itself with visual design in the area of the textual character. It includes issues like the meaning behind font size, type and case, character spacing and character symbols. · Inter level design concerns itself with the chunking and spacing of text and pictures. It focuses on paragraphs, headings, indentations, and other highlighting methods. · Extra level design concerns itself with elements that operate outside of the main text. It includes pictures, tables, figures, charts, call-outs and the detail and layout of these elements. · Supra level design concerns itself with document-wide decisions like page orientation, colour schemes, logos that continually appear. Overall, this work is more practical than theoretical.
It is an interesting introduction to the use of graphics in print-based
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