Visual Communication

This visual essay curates an exhibition of photographic data from a project with children about Landcare, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to managing environmental issues in local communities across Australia. The project sought to empower children to engage with Landcare Reserves through participatory arts-based research to map their awareness of and participation in local Landcare Reserve sites. This visual essay recognizes the images as agentic entities, with the power to activate the gaze beyond the boundaries of this project as embedded yet transcendent from it whilst simultaneously acknowledging the ‘failing’ agency of the sensing body of the camera.

This article uses the Museum of Vision Science and other museums of optometry as an entry point for considering the science of seeing and the seeing of science. The Museum of Vision Science, the only optometric museum in Canada, is part of an optometry school. The placement of the Museum of Vision Science within an optometry school perhaps harkens back to 19th-century examples of professional schools and museums, and this article suggests ways the museum could offer a dynamic approach to humanities understandings of vision within a science curriculum. But, more broadly, this article uses the case study of the Museum of Vision Science to consider larger possibilities for visual communication studies in conversation with optometry. Although the museum situates itself as one of vision science, it also offers a complicated ‘cultural’ history of vision. The author bridges questions of the hegemony of vision science with the practice of visual communication studies.

Recent decades have witnessed the increasing popularity of animation used for science education. However, the affordances of animation are still yet to be described in a comprehensive manner. Working on a corpus of online science animated videos, this article firstly proposes a visual rhythm system for animation, and then examines the convergence and divergence of the rhythm in animation and language at different levels of analysis. The author found that different visual rhythms in animation function to construe different quantities and properties of entities. In terms of the intermodal relations between animation and language, at shorter wavelengths, animation can be in sync with the rhythm in language, with different ‘beats’ in animation converging with different phonological units in language; at longer wavelengths, the larger rhythmic pattern of animation can function to scaffold the generic structure of language. This article enriches the systematic description of the meaning-making potential of animation, which also informs empirical studies focusing on the effectiveness of animation used for science education.

This article looks at artistic impressions of future robotics and considers how they inspire research into human–machine interaction. Our analysis of visual scientific practices and the epistemic ramifications of these speculative drawings emerges from a long-term participant observation study in a multi-disciplinary project on smart and autonomous technologies in public spaces. We discuss the design, appropriation and modulation of visual scenarios, and scrutinize how these diegetic futurescapes are imaginatively engaging and suggestive of scientific progress and experimentation. The article argues that the future-oriented scenes defy common notions of post hoc scientific representations. Instead, they are ex ante presentations of the ambition to imagine human–machine relations in the future and to draw the large-scale research venture together. The register of evaluation thereby shifts from aesthetic criteria to scientific parameters. More than just visual tokens, the scenarios became a catalyst for collaboration.

Studying the city as text is influenced by a phenomenon called the linguistic turn. This is because the text of the city is composed of different semiotic systems. This study employs multimodal discourse analysis as its theoretical framework. Through a close examination of the organizational, interactional and representational metafunction of the city text, the authors aim to highlight its characteristics as a communicational resource to provide a multimodal reading of the city. They demonstrate how applying a social semiotic approach to the physical dimensions of a street contributes to a particular understanding of how this public space is used or navigated and how the formal management of the flow of cars and people is materialized. Here the city is classified into different levels of resolution based on urban morphology’s description of the urban tissue. The text of the city is constructed through dialogue among meaning metafunctions on one level and among different levels. Examining different aspects of meaning in the text of Imam Khomeini Street and the city of Rasht indicates how, in such a text, the producers and participants communicate through the material aspect of the city. Uses of semiotic materials are ideological and their affordances have evolved in specific socio-political moments. In this street, the city as an institution and as a place of authority having the biggest share in the production of this text persuades other participants to follow and reproduce a certain narration of the reality. Controlling and training the body, on one hand, and using the urban space for advertising the dominant discourse, on the other hand, are the boldest motives of this street’s design, and the formation of the different dimensions of meaning is somehow at the service of the consolidation of a particular kind of everyday life.

Some types of data graphs are more easily understood than others. Following the suggestion that typically encountered graphs may activate individuals’ cognitive schema quickly, this study investigated prior exposure to and typicality of three common graph types: vertical bar graphs, horizontal bar graphs and line graphs; and three common data patterns: rising, neutral and falling. Results from two samples (N = 57 and N = 30) suggest that vertical bar graphs are encountered more frequently, are rated as more typical and are identified more quickly than horizontal bar graphs and line graphs; also that rising data patterns are more typical than falling and neutral data patterns. The findings contribute new knowledge about the hierarchical structure of graph schema and can inform design choices about which graph types might best facilitate viewers’ understanding of data visualizations.

This article explores the nature of multimodal meaning-making in writing by analyzing the script-switching used in Japanese pop culture. Japanese intermixes multiple script systems in one text. Although official and public documents follow standard orthographic conventions, creative works in pop culture texts freely and regularly break these norms by switching script types to create new meanings. However, while many previous works recognize the semiotic effects of script-switching, to this day, there is no systematic account for how and why such meaning-making operates. Notably, script-switching triggers meanings independent of linguistic meaning. Yet, scripts are a visual manifestation of language, so one cannot say they are independent of language. Accordingly, this work attempts to resolve this dilemma by exploring a social semiotic multimodal approach (see Van Leeuwen ‘Typographic meaning’, 2005, and ‘Towards a semiotics of typography’, 2006, and Stöckl ‘Typography: Body and dress of a text’, 2005), which claims the semiotic independence of typography and its interdependency with language. By recognizing the basic unit of the writing system as graphemes, the author argues that the Japanese script systems are categorized into four types of graphemes depending on the linguistic unit they relate to and she demonstrates how the visual unit of the grapheme and the linguistic unit interact in meaning-making. In this analysis, script-switching occurs when grapheme types are intentionally changed to foreground a visual meaning associated with each script system. This article shows that such a meaning reflects the historical development and discursive social practices of writing with multiple script systems throughout the history of the Japanese writing system.

By drawing on a communication-based approach to populism, this article argues that populism research should put more emphasis on the performative and stylistic dimension of the phenomenon, including its visual elements, in different media formats. The study theoretically refers to the distinction of populism through and by the media, which has been discussed to a great extent in populist political communication research. Empirically, the author focuses on visual representations of politicians on the covers of the German news weekly Der Spiegel as well as those of Compact – a far-right alternative magazine. The article argues that political magazines contribute to how the political is imagined, particularly by the visual messages they convey via their front pages. An image type analysis of both magazines’ covers between 2010 and 2020 is conducted (N = 103) in order to explore patterns in the visual representations of German politicians disseminated by the magazines. On the one hand, the comparison of a mainstream and far-right alternative medium enriches the theoretical debate of how populism is strengthened by opportunity structures through the media. On the other hand, the issue of how populism is actively promoted by the media is addressed.

The representation of women in advertising is based on constructs that have become consolidated in Western culture, giving rise to different archetypes that express the values and ways of thinking of each age. As in other media discourses, advertising resorts to elements, such as archetypes and myths, which shape the collective imaginary and are very effective devices, for they are recognizable to viewers and help to engage them. Specifically, this article focuses on car advertising, whose significance lies in the fact that it has traditionally been a sphere of male domination. In recent years, there has been a positive evolution towards more independent and autonomous female characters. Accordingly, this article analyses two of Audi’s most recent campaigns from 2016 and 2017 in order to observe how women are represented in car ads according to three fundamental aspects: visual semiotics (Arnheim’s Arte y percepción visual. Psicología del ojo creador, 2008; Casetti and Di Chio’s Cómo analizar un film, 1994; Van Leeuwen’s ‘Semiotics and iconography’, 2001), iconography (Cassirer’s Filosofía de las formas simbólicas, 1998); Panofsky’s ‘Iconografía e iconología: introducción al estudio del arte del Renacimiento, 1987) and symbolism grounded in a myth analysis of advertising (León’s Mitoanálisis de la publicidad, 2001).

This article presents three studies that evaluate the effectiveness of instructional pictures that visualize Heimlich maneuver thrusts. Firstly, a corpus study is used to describe a collection of 30 pictures employing a model in which the angle, perspective, body and hand positions of the first-aid helper and the victim, the thrust action and its depicted results are analysed. Results show a large variation in the visualizations of the same action. Secondly, 56 potential users of the pictures filled out a questionnaire to evaluate the clarity and correctness with which the action is displayed in five representative pictures from the corpus with Heimlich’s description of the thrust action as a reference. Results showed that the pictures were considered far from perfect. In particular, the clarity of the visualization of the helper applying pressure on the abdomen of the victim was considered the least clear and incorrect. Thirdly, six certified first-aid instructors gave their expert opinions on the five pictures. Their comments concentrate on the location of the hands which are depicted dangerously high on the front of the victim. These studies advance the annotation and evaluation methodologies for the investigation of visualized actions. Results serve authoring and analysis of multimodal instructions.

Artificial intelligence is already embedded in several digital tools used across design disciplines. Although it offers advantages in automating and facilitating design tasks, this technology has constraints to empowering practitioners. AI systems steadily incorporate machine learning to deliver meaningful designs but fail in critical dimensions such as creativity. Moreover, the intensive use of AI features to provide a design solution – so-called AI design – challenges the boundaries of the design field and designers’ roles. AI-powered logo makers exemplify a horizon where non-designers can access design tools to create a personal or business visual identity. However, in the current context, these online businesses are limited to randomize layout solutions lacking the visual properties a logo requires. This article reports mixed-method research focusing on AI-powered logo makers’ processes and outcomes. We investigated their capability to deliver consistent logo designs and to what extent their algorithms address logo design principles. Initially, our study identified representative visual principles in logo design-related literature. After probing AI-powered logo makers’ features that enable logo creation, we conducted an exploratory experiment to obtain solutions. Finally, we invited logo design experts to evaluate whether three visual principles (proportion, balance and unity) were incorporated into the layouts. The assessment’s results suggest that these AI design tools must calibrate the algorithms to provide solutions that meet expected logo design standards. Even focusing on a particular AI tool and a few visual principles, our research contributes to initial directions for developing algorithms that embody the complex aspects of visual design syntax.