Visual Rhetoric and Principles of Design

Visual rhetoric is the study of the relationship between images and techniques of persuasion, rhetoric itself has been used since ancient times by orators, philosophers, artists and leaders.

Visual rhetoric on the other hand deals with images. Marketers favour using visuals to persuade consumers. Scholars have begun to study the scope of visual rhetoric by analysing photographs, drawings, graphs, movies, advertisements and other visual elements which are used to influence minds. Some studies stress that visual rhetoric is a combination of text and images, while others believe images could stand alone if structured properly from a design perspective. Designers have also borrowed heavily from the school of gestalt psychology, especially in terms of its perception theory. I firmly believe that is one of the best methods to illicit emotions and incite thoughts if it was used properly.

It is crucial to explore comprehensively on the subject of rhetoric before we even begin conceptualising design ideas, to emphasize this importance is how content presides form in the visual design process. The art of persuasion is rooted in Aristotle’s endeavour in developing persuasive speech. Rhetoric is broken down into ethos, logos and pathos, they are defined in three methods as; persuasion by character, persuasion by emotion & persuasion by logic.

a. Persuasion by character; is fulfilled by a person who is conveying the message as one who is credible, who has good will, good sense and good morals. We trust a person with good sense, one who is rationale and reasonable. One who does the right thing even when there is no one looking, and a person with good will is one who has our best interest in their hearts (Rapp,2010).

b. Persuasion by emotion; the duality of emotions, here are few brief summaries. Anger versus calm. People show anger when we show contempt to them, shame them or act spitefully against them. In other words, shaming someone is equivalent to discrediting someone. Kindness versus unkindness, people tend to think we are kind when we help them especially if they need it for their own sake and people think we are unkind when we do not help them or when we do it for selfish reasons. A master persuader will know how to incite these emotions when they are justified (Grimaldi, 1988).

c. Persuasion by logic; a good logical argument has a series of premises, statements that are either true or false, and a conclusion must be made either in a deductive or inductive or abductive manner by the speakers (Rapp,2010).

According to Hill & Helmers (2004) Defining Visual Rhetorics, visual rhetoric was developed by Roland Barthes (1977). He applied the linguistic approach from the French linguist Saussure who published the study of differences between words and signs, for example the names we associate with objects are merely arbitrary but it is rather the social and linguistic convention that determines any link to the object.

This also infers with the theory of semiotics in Saussure’s work (1966), his studies in theory of sign relationship in his Course in General Linguistics helps us understand the sign relationship in semiotics. In the case of cinema, specifically in the Hollywood system of production, the woman takes on the role as the signifier. The image of the woman signifies the idea that the woman is a sexual object either through the objective shot from the camera or through a point of view shot of a male character in that movie. Another avenue that we should look into also is, the studies in connotation and denotation by Roland Barthes (1968) which have extended the studies of signified and signifier, into a simpler concept known as denotation and connotation. Denotation can be a direct meaning or a literal meaning from a sign, whereas connotation will be how the object evokes us, to point that we create a symbolic image on a subjective level (Smith et al., 2004).

Visual Rhetoric in Advertisements: Visual Structure & Verbal Anchoring

Lagerwerf, Hooijdonk, Korenberg, (2012) embarked on a research investigation, they analysed the interpretation of visual rhetoric in in the field of advertising. They studied the relationship between verbal anchoring and visual structure in advertisements. To note that the research focused specifically on print advertisements.

The authors of the research used the theoretical framework of visual rhetoric from Roland Barthes Rhétorique de l’image (1977). The authors also included the role of cognitive psychology in their research since they were studying multimodal responses from the audience. The research required experiments, which were anchored on 20 years’ worth of material in advertising research and its relationship to visual rhetoric. The outcome of the experiment was to enable creative heads to improve their advertising strategies through visual rhetoric, for example using visual metaphors with captions and together with other pictorial elements. The researchers ascertained certain visual design dimensions in print advertisements are expected to affect audience perception in making key decisions in their day to day lives (Philips et al, as cited in Lagerwerf et al., 2012). In their research some of the visual design elements that I have noted are fusion, juxtaposition, similarity and connection principles.

Fig. 1

The researchers used eye tracking methods to analyse the respondents, which is the Tobii Eye Tracker 1750, it samples pupils at 50hz frequency. It computes the participant’s eye movements in terms of; time spent looking at the advertisements. The researchers collected data in terms of time looking a text in the advertisement, time looking at the picture and finally the saccades between the advertisements image and text, and vice versa (Lagerwerf et al., 2012). The respondents were 83 students, with an average age of 23 and 79% were women. After watching the advertisements, the participants were given a set of questionnaires about the advertisements they just watched. The results of the finding from the experiment showed that fusion & similarity advertisements were much favoured by respondents compared to others.

Fusion advertisements are visual metaphors that infuse an idea or thought that seems previously similar to us. For example, the Sony USB in figure 1 where the USB supposedly replaces or archives our old ways of organising CD’s in a convenient manner now; while in figure 2 the Salmon infuses the design element of a roll-up tin refreshingly, it emphasises the produce quality in terms of freshness.

Fig. 2

Limitations in the research could be attributed to the research sampling aspect. The opinions of the respondents could diverge widely from one individual to another, furthermore thoughts of the respondents could be subjective since the demographics are not uniform. Nonetheless in order to remedy this issue, they adopted an ‘openness’ from previous researchers especially in the case of studying visual metaphors (Philips et al, as cited in Lagerwerf et al., 2012). It has to be noted here that visual metaphors may have artful deviations in several respects.

References

Grimaldi, W. M. (1988). Aristotle, Rhetoric: a commentary. 2. Rhetoric II (Vol. 2). Fordham Univ Press.).

Hill, C. A., & Helmers, M. (2012). Defining visual rhetorics. Routledge.

Lagerwerf, L., van Hooijdonk, C. M., & Korenberg, A. (2012). Processing visual rhetoric in advertisements: Interpretations determined by verbal anchoring and visual structure. Journal of pragmatics, 44(13), 1836-1852.

Rapp, C. (2010, February 01). Aristotle's Rhetoric, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/

Smith, K. L., Moriarty, S., Kenney, K., & Barbatsis, G. (2004). Handbook of visual communication: Theory, methods, and media. Routledge.