Visual Language (Week 6)

What is visual language?

Visual language is to examine the relationship between text and image.

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, linguist, critic, and semiotist who lived from 1915 all the way to 1980. His ideas covered and impacted a variety of fields such as structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology, and post-structuralism.

Barthes chose to focus on compositions from advertising. In advertising, the reader can be sure that signification is always intentional. It is the purpose of advertising to list out all the positive characteristics of a product to persuade a consumer to buy it.

This illustration was first published as the front cover of Leslie's Weekly in July 1916 by the artist Frank Leslie.

This is the Britons' version of that poster.

And then there's a few more posters, with red all over on the borders.

Color Psychology

One common thing these posters have in common is the fact that they have red as a striking color. But what exactly is the significance of the color red? In advertising, red is used to trigger excitement, or any sort of equally extreme emotion (Alexander, 2014).

Other colors have influence on the way we think as well. For example, blue is associated with depth and stability, whereas black is power, mystery and death. That is why whenever we enter a room painted with cool colors we instantly become relaxed (Unknown, 2014).

Rhetorics

The meaning of rhetorics, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is the art of speaking or writing effectively, such as

a: the study of principles and rules of composition formulated by critics of ancient times

b: the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion

My Thoughts For Today

I was actually struggling to keep up with writing the notes and listening at the same time. I think I got the main points down, so I only typed what I know and researched on.

References

Alexander, C. (2014). Using Color Psychology In Advertising [online] Divvy. Available at: http://divvyonline.com/using-color-psychology-in-advertising-20141029 [Accessed 4 Oct. 2018]

Unknown (2014). You know that feeling...automatically feel calmer and relaxed? Philosophy Communication. [blog] 18 April. Available at: https://philosophycommunication.com/marketing/advertising-color-theory/ [Accessed 4 Oct. 2018]