This is almost it! The class is almost over. There's today's lesson post, and Monday's peer review session (and a wrap-up lesson post that day).
Here's the timeline for this week:
5/13, right now: this lesson post.
5/16, midnight: P3 blog adaptation due. Also, finish your P4 drafts around that time, though you will not receive professor feedback on those--make sure you're ready for Monday's peer review.
5/17: peer review for P4 and a short end-of-class lesson post.
P4’s draft is due Monday 5/17 before peer review, but you will not receive draft feedback from me; you will have to depend solely on your peer group for that. The finalized version of P4 is due on 5/23. More details on the assignment below.
This is a very aggressive timeline: plan your paper, draft it by Sunday, peer review it Monday, turn it in the following Sunday. This is meant to evaluate your ability to analyze and write about a topic in a hurry with minimal professor feedback--a sort of low-risk final exam. The paper is short, as you'll see below.
But first, the concepts:
Visual Rhetoric is Easy but Learning it is Hard
Visual rhetoric, as the name implies, is how we convey messages and meaning through images or visual texts. This includes things like the design around “normal” texts (like web design, document layouts, cover art on books, et cetera), purely visual texts (paintings, photos, sculptures, .gifs), audio-visual or text-and-visual objects (TikToks, Instagram posts, print and video advertisements, propaganda posters, memes, propaganda memes, et cetera).
Visual rhetoric is the “layer” of those objects that you understand by seeing, and how that layer contains meaning and how it interacts with the other layers (like text, audio, context, movement).
You instinctively use visual rhetorical skills all the time. Every time you understand how a picture and a message fit together, you’re doing it.
That TikTok where the person uses the flashing colors and that one song? You know what the vibe of the joke will be already. Visual rhetoric.
That sweet pie-chart you put in your research paper to make it look data-oriented and authoritative? Visual rhetoric.
Those “flatten the curve” memes that made this whole pandemic situation easier to understand back in spring? Visual rhetoric.
A Renaissance painting with angels and devils where the museum guide tells you the faces of the devils are portraits of the artist's terrible siblings, constituting 600 year old thrown shade? Visual rhetoric.
You’ve internalized visual rhetorical skills your whole life, in much the same way you learned how to speak your native language.
The voice in your head reads these bold words with a different tone than these regular words. And THis seT OF woRDs is SarCAStiC aNd LilLTINg. AND THIS IS YELLING. Visual rhetoric includes text formatting too.
Application Example: Product Parity
Here’s a classic example of visual rhetoric. You’re at the grocery store (in the Before Times, I know, unrealistic example) looking for breakfast cereal. Here’s the shelf:
Which one do you buy?
Logically, the Great Value Fruit Spins are a dollar cheaper than Kellogg’s Froot Loops, but you feel better about buying the Froot Loops. Why?
The image is low-res, but here’s what we know:
Both boxes are 21.7 oz.
Both are filled with grain-based tire-shaped cereal that never, ever tastes like fruit.
They don’t feel the same, even though they’re made of the same stuff, and maybe even made in the same factory*.
*Yeah, sometimes, grocery store-brand cereal is literally made in the same place, but it’s “flawed” (usually the food coloring is low or the shapes are weird) or produced on a line using cheaper food coloring or sweetening agents.
Let’s analyze the Froot Loops box in terms of visual rhetoric:
It’s red--an attention-grabbing and hunger-inspiring color (why do you think all those fast-food restaurants have red in the design?) It’s got Toucan Sam, a mascot you probably grew up seeing in commercials and who you trust on some level (“follow your nose!” says the bird with no nose about a cereal with no distinct smell--brand loyalty). It “now provides Fiber” (it’s cereal, it always did, but whatever) and is “Family Size” (the box is bigger, but there’s still only 21.7 oz. of cereal in there). The brightly colored cereal is leaping happily out of some joyously-splashing milk, making the cereal seem exciting and lively. And the nutrition facts are right on the front!
Healthy! Expensive! You want it.
Meanwhile, over on the left, we’ve got the Fruit Spins:
Represented by a plain white box (cheaper) by a mascot I will name Nightmare Pale Frog. He looks depressed, even though he’s on a water slide into vaguely purple-looking milk (like the color it turns if you don’t eat the cereal fast enough) being chased by Creepy White Toad. The photo of the cereal looks like the Great Value marketing team took a photo on a Motorola flip-phone. The product is described verbosely as “Sweetened multigrain cereal, natural fruit flavors with other natural flavors.” The box is smaller (cheaper).
Joyless and nondescript, like a Soviet bureaucrat.
So, unless you have a budget, you buy the Froot Loops, even though the stuff in the box is 100% the same stuff and you could have had it for a dollar less. You just paid a dollar for a red box with a cartoon toucan on it. And it was totally on purpose.
The grocery store makes more money if you buy the branded item. Kelloggs makes more money if you buy the branded item. That’s why the design is the way it is. Great Value just sells the extra stuff to people who can’t or won’t afford the branded item--they’re not trying that hard to capture your attention, since the only person the store-brand cereal benefits is you.
This phenomenon is called product parity--when two (or more) purchasing options are the same, aesthetic variables like how pretty the box is and especially what the product says about your identity, can make a big difference. It’s a cheap trick, but we do it all the time.
Lexus? Toyota with leather seats. Every new iPhone? Same as the last one. It’s about your social status, brand identity, and what looks nice.
It’s a trick of visual or design rhetoric, and even though you’re aware of it, it still works. You want to be the kind of person who buys pretty cereal. Especially if, like me, you grew up on the store brand. It's all status.
How Does This Work? A Basic Explanation
Advertisements and propaganda are the same, and the theories that govern their modern iterations were invented at the same time, by the same people (weirdly, these people were mostly American, and it was the 1910-1950s). In each case, they try and sell you a product by selling you a whole world and identity instead. They do this to make their product/cause distinct from other, very similar products/causes.
McDonalds TV commercials, for instance, usually include a hip, diverse group of young adult friends and catchy music, because their food is pretty bad but you want to be hip and cool and have diverse friends who all like each other and eat fried stuff together. Burger King focuses on the grill lines on their not-actually-grilled meat, but not on who eats there, making a case for their food being authentic and real compared to McD’s.
Wendy’s goes for the “chaotic energy” Gen-Z humor vibe. Their burgers are square. Quirky Memes.
A very on the nose example: the box cover for an early version of the board game Battleship:
Don't look in the upper right-hand corner unless you want your opinion of 1950s America confirmed.
The box that a game comes in is an advertisement for the lifestyle this game will supposedly give you (note that it's a picture of a whole scene, not just the game itself). It’s 1957, and you’re the mom in the upper right, who makes all the purchasing decisions because your husband, the white-sweater-vest-wearing Ward, works a 12-hour shift at the widget factory. You see this box, and you buy it. Why?
Battleship is a pen-and-paper game like Hangman. You don’t need to buy it. But:
Like the family in the cover-art, you want Ward to bond with your son Junior. You have that blue formica table (all your grandparents did) and you just moved into this suburban house (a new invention in the 50s–suburbs were not a thing before WW2) with the wood paneling, like in the picture. You want your family to be happy, like the two figures in the foreground. Ward and Junior being happy will, of course, make you and your daughter Karen happy*.
That’s why mom and daughter, doing dishes, are smiling in the background of the box art. Why include them otherwise? Mom is the target audience for the ad, but not the intended user of the product.
*Note, thanks to the year this box is from, that little girl will one day be the Karen. It turns out, washing dishes and being forced to give up on your personal happiness and human autonomy to serve your your dad and brother's daily comfort maybe wasn't a great way to organize a whole society. Just sayin'.
Ads and other forms of visual rhetoric will often identify their audience by including them, or a happier version of them, in the material.
Is this lifestyle unlikely? Yes. Ward served in the Pacific in The War and probably doesn’t want to have a flashback while playing a naval-battle-themed board game. Junior is more into baseball, and you’ve never smiled while doing dishes. But the patriotic color scheme* (red and blue, and a white sweater vest! So America! Or Britain! or France! or…), the happy people in an idealized version of your own life drive you to spend $5.25 on this board game.
*Sidebar: blue being “the good guy color” and red “the bad guy color” in games, video games, and movies is a legacy of WW2 and the subsequent Cold War. In both cases, the US’s adversaries co-opted the traditionally “good guy” red in their own designs, so we used blue--a color we'd also used in the Revolutionary War 200 years earlier because our bros the French liked blue and had spare uniforms--establishing a color legacy that lives to this day. Nazis are red, Democracy is blue. NATO was blue, the Warsaw Pact was red.
In other cultures, this color polarity is the opposite, red=nice and blue=mean. In movies, this older model survives: red-orange hues in a scene are good or happy, blue hues are bad or sad.
Final Example: Not an Ad, Still Has a Message
The use of things like figures and characters, foreground and background, color schemes, layout, position, lighting, and the relationship between image and copy (the text on an image) are key things to look out for when analyzing visual texts. These elements (along with existing cultural knowledge) create context, which is unspoken (or unprinted) information that gives otherwise-neutral information its message, impact, or bias.
Watch the video below for explanation of how image analysis sounds, and the power of context to change or inform meaning:
Today's thumbnail face is...special.
Without access to crucial information (where you got the image from, historical events at the time, a full view of the image, and other info), informational or public-service announcements, art paintings, news photos, sculptures, and Instagram posts can change radically in meaning. The control of context, through visual design, is one of the most common forms of information and audience manipulation.
As many of you have survived this election season, you've probably encountered the dangers of missing context, message drift, or visual manipulation already. If we'd done this class a month ago, the sudden awareness of these things might have triggered a crisis in some of you.
P4 Image Analysis Paper
The assignment this week is simple: pick a visual rhetorical object, like a photo, a painting, an ad, a short video, a reaction-gif, a meme, a sculpture, a propaganda poster, an Instagram post, etc. Write a paper of 750-1000 words that explains how it means what it means. In other words:
State what you think the message or thesis of the image is. What is it trying to mean? To whom is it speaking? In what context?
Describe it briefly, highlighting key elements that help the image have meaning.
Break down how it communicates its message to its audience, using visual elements like color, texture, position, branding, copy, and other things to reach its audience emotionally and/or logically.
Include the image, probably at the end for the paper.
A note on context: if your chosen visual rhetorical object has multiple contexts--like a meme that appears in casual conversations all the time--then you can choose a single context (say, one conversation) and discuss how the image's larger context informs that smaller one.
This paper is worth 10% of your course grade. Peer review is Monday, but the paper is very short and meant to explain one thing: how does this image mean what you think it means?
This assignment is a test of whether you can write a good, smart thing fast and without my help. As such, I will not provide draft feedback. It’s just you and your peers.
When you’re done, turn in the paper on Canvas by 5/23. Then, post your image and a one or two sentence summary of what you think it means on the class Slack in the channel called #p4results. This is the last assignment in our course!
Homework and Course Evaluations
Draft your image analysis paper. Peer review on Monday. Finalize it, turn in the paper on Canvas by Sunday, and post a note about it on the Slack.
Do the participation quiz for this class.
Note: course evaluations are now open, so you can fill out your evaluations here. Course evaluations are an important part of the process of evaluating whether a class works, whether a professor is doing a good job, and what can be adjusted, fixed, or kept for next semester.
Check this blog on Monday for the last post of the semester, including more info on course evaluations, the Arak essay contest, and more.
Here's also a handy guide for P4:
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