Visual Literacy: Who are you?

'Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.'

Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Imagery can be used to communicate messages and the different devices that can be used to convey said messages. These are the visual semiotics:

The Visual Semiotics

A Visual Metaphor is used to transfer messages from one image to another, draws comparisons between the two to create a new image. 

A Visual Synecdoche is used to represent something that is a part of something, which in turn is representing the whole image. Works only with images and subjects that are widely known so the connection exists. (Statue of Liberty = New York)

Visual Metonym is a symbolic image that is used to reference something more literally. (Yellow taxi cab = New york / Star of david = Judaism)

Type can be effected in all manner of ways, these all affect the way we read due to the hierarchy in which they are presented, these different effects can manipulate how they're read.

Legibility 

Readability

Scale

Bold/Light

A good example to find this from is Newspapers as they use multiple weights and effects to push forward specific text to grab your attention.

'If you can't make it good, make it BIG. - If you can't make it big make it red!'

Rob Roy Kelly

Emphasis, pace and volume are all determined by hierarchies too, the spacing, scale, kerning all affect the ways in which your read the words. Videos where you can see this in motion is in Kinetic Type videos. 

There's a really good pace to Costanza telling the joke throughout this sketch and It's been executed well in the video to show his pacing, volume and emphasis.

For this session we were tasked to create the sentence 'Who are you?' in light, regular, bold in 24pt, 36pt, 72pt and at 144pt Then to have them all cut up into the different words as they are seen above.

 In class we had to read them out after mixing them up and changing the orders of weights and pt sizes, going around the table. It was really cool, because this highlighted the same thing the kinetic type video showed off, the emphasis we place on words that are bold and big. But it did bring into question what happens when something is big and bold and small and bold. What we thought we were trying to say didn't come out and that created some differences in how we were trying to perceive what they word order they were reading was.

For the next session we had to do the same, but find a typeface that represented the accent with it using the below list... So for Scottish find a typeface that reads off been Scottish, etc. This was because, even though we can change emphasis and speed, you can also affect the dialect of the type depending on what it looks like through it's typeface. 

1. Scottish
2. South African
3. Italian
4. Texan
5. Mexican
6. Somerset
7. Brummie
8. Cockney
9. German
10. Chinese 
11. Swedish

With the examples we brought in, we swapped tables to get a new load from a group. We then had to sort these into all the different accents without knowing which one they were for. The really hard ones to identify where the regional accents, summerset and brummie especially as there is nothing to really identify them you had to work of someone else's perception of what they though it visually would look like as a typeface. Easier ones to identify were Chinese, Texan, Mexican, German because these all had very distinct associations that everyone else can agree with in the aesthetic of the typefaces. The German ones were mostly black-letter, while the chinese ones were crude english typefaces looking chinese.

After that we made 5 rules about typography in our small group, these were:

1. No more than three typefaces in one piece of design

2. Never use a block font in body copy

3. Never use a script font in body copy

4. Don't track or kern too much

5. Don't increase or decrease the leading excessively in body copy