TODAY

1. Icebreaker: guilty pleasure

2. Defining Visual Rhetoric3. Design Task Zero4. Homework

Ice breaking

For today, I want each of you to say your name and share with the group one of your “guilty pleasures,” which, of course, are things you enjoy that you’re either slightly embarrassed by or don’t think your friends would find cool.

Defining visual

rhetoric

Our starting point for the semester will be this: defining visual rhetoric. I’ll be opening a Word document to take notes as we talk. But first, a few quick slides with some elements to consider.

Rhetoric is…

…"the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion.”-Aristotle

…”the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.”-BurkeMore! And citation for these two.

And Visual…

Adjective1.of or pertaining to seeing or sight: avisual image.2.used in seeing: the visual sense.3.optical.4.perceptible by the sense of sight;visible: a visual beauty.5.perceptible by the mind; of the nature of a mental vision: a visual impression captured in a line of verse.

YOUR DEFINITION HERE.

See Dr. Phill’s Tumblr for links to a few things to read as you form your definitions.

So let’s talk

about why

The visual

matters

One of the easiest places to go to see the essence of visual rhetoric is to look at posters. Let’s look at a series of movie posters from the last year, compliments of Empire magazine.

And from that…

Let’s work on design activity one. Turn to the website at phillalexander.com/vis. Notice that the header is… not fantastic.

Please form groups so that someone in your group knows how to use either InDesign or Photoshop to the point that you can edit images.

Group up– no less than 2, no more than 3.

Make a better

banner!

Thinking about what we’ve discussed so far, make a more compelling, useful, visually pleasing banner for the course website. The image needs to be 160 pixels high and should be roughly 1200 wide (though it can repeat, or be shorter).

For Next Time

For Tuesday:

Read: Wysocki “The Multiple Media of Texts” and “With Eyes That Think and Compose and Think,” Barthes “Rhetoric of the Image,” Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction,” (all on Niihka) and Kress “Reading Images”

Remember your design task, your reading response (make sure for next week you respond to THIS set of readings), and don’t forget to work on the InDesign tutorials.