Visual Literacy Lecture Notes

Visual literacy lecture notes

• The ability to construct meaning from visual images and type, interpreting images of the present past and a range of cultures producing images that effectively communicate a message to an audience and the ability to interpret, negotiate and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image.

• Based on the idea that images can be read.

• The only thing needed if for an agreement between a group of people that one thing stands for another.

• To make the visual communication effective an understanding of the meanings of the images is needed so that the audience sees the right thing.

• Images with multiple meanings can be put into context by the use of other images.

• Colour can also give context images with multiple meanings 

• Colour form and format can be manipulated to change meaning 

• Being visually literate requires an awareness of the relationship between visual syntax and visual semantics 

• Visual syntax refers to the pictorial structure and visual organisation of elements It represents the basic building blocks of an image that affect the way we 'read' it.

• These elements include: framing - format - scale - colour - font - stroke - weight - shape - composition - layout - motion - light - rhythm -  space - depth - texture - text - words - tone - shade - line - mark - direction - editing - manipulation - simplification - emphasis layering - hierarchy etc

• The semantics of an image refers way an image fits into a cultural process of communication. It includes the relationship between form and meaning and the way meaning is created through:

• These elements include: cultural references - social ideals - religious beliefs - political ideas - historical structures - iconic forms - social interaction - individual experience - recognised symbols - established signs etc

• Semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.

• Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which studies the structure and meaning of language.

• Semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems, visual language and visual literacy

• Visual elements of semiotics include: symbol, sign, signifier, metaphor, metonym, synecdoche. 

• A metonym is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance, "Westminster", a borough of London in the United Kingdom, could be used as a metonym for its government.

• (A synecdoche (meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something, or vice versa.