REVIEW AND FORECAST: KOSTELNICK AND ROBERTS

For Lab Assignment 1, you were to have read K and R Chapter 1. There you picked up some concepts and vocabulary that enhance your ability to understand both how to compose visual designs and how designs affect readers. After you read chapters, ask yourself to provide an example of each concept. If you cannot do so, go back and read again.

1. Rhetorical Situation: audience (users, readers, viewers); purpose (enable discussion, persuade, inform, entertain, give pleasure); context of reception (where will the reading take place? What should readers do or know or learn?)

2. “Cognates”:

• Arrangement: order, organization, structure, space
• Emphasis: prominence, intensity of expression, what catches the eye

• Clarity: quick understanding AND a rich understanding of complex data
• Conciseness: lots of information packed into a simple visual, reduced bulk, reduced intricacy of design w/o losing info richness

• Tone: general “feel” determined by word choice, colors, spatial design, fonts, etc.
• Ethos: levels of trust achieved through design

Conventions: flexible or relaxed (depends on rhetorical situation). Important aids to composition.

For Wednesday, read K and R Chapter 2. The lab assignment will ask you to verbalize your work using Chapter 2 vocabulary and concepts as needed and drawing selectively on those listed above for Chapter 1.

Gestalt

Focal points

Past experience as filter

Completing a task (goal-directed looking)

Visual field

Context and perception

Figure/ground

Grouping

Visual Noise