Context of Practice Lecture: Visual Literacy- The Language of Design

'Life was much easier when Apple and Blackberry were just fruits.'

Visual communication, in it's simplest terms, is the process of sending and receiving messages and information using type and image. It is based on a level of shared understanding of signs, symbolic gestures and objects. For visual communication to work there must be a common tongue shared by creator and audience. Without an agreement as to what certain sign and symbols mean across a range of social and cultural contexts, Visual Communication cannot exist. These conventions are built from a foundation of universal and cultural symbols.

Images can be read and Visual Literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate and construct meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Symbols are learned and manipulating them effects meaning. Depending on the cultural or societal context symbols have multiple interpretations, which is why its is important to clarify to prevent confusion. Being Visually Literate requires a certain level of awareness of the relationship between Visual Syntax and Visual Semantics.

Visual Syntax is the pictorial structure and visual organisation of elements within an image, representing the basic building blocks of an image and how we read it. Composition, framing, lighting etc, all of this has an effect on Visual Syntax.

Visual Semantics refers to the way an image fits into a cultural process of communication, including the relationship between form and meaning and the way meaning is created through different social and cultural ideas.

Semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes such as likeness, analogy, metaphor, signification, designation, indication and communication. Though the word is usually associated with linguistics, Semiotics also involves the study of non-linguistic sign systems.

Semiotics= Symbol, Sign, Signifier

Visual Synecdoche is a term applied when a part is used to represent the whole or vice versa.

Statue of Liberty > New York

London > Big Ben

A Visual Metonym is a symbolic image that is used to make reference to something with a more literal meaning.

Yellow Taxi > New York

A Visual Metaphor is used to transfer the meaning from one image to another.

Big Apple > New York