Example OF Essay On Essentials OF Visual Communication

Chapter 8: Typography

This chapter discusses in details about typography. It has been identified that this refers to the letter shapes, their usage and the setting within which they occur. For many years, letters have been used to convey people’s thoughts, ideas, and feelings from one sender to a receiver.
Typography is divided into visible and invisible typographies. For visible typography, the organization of letters in some way discloses the sender of the message. This intends to bring to life the sender’s message. These letters can take different characters. For instance, they can be pretentious, tentative, harsh, cheeky or vulgar. Invisible typography, on the other hand, the designer creates a connection between the sender and the person receiving the message. Nevertheless, the designer does not reveal anything about him or herself in the process.
Typeface is also identified as a completed alphabet letter within a single design. Typeface designers always begin with lower case letters. Since new typefaces tend to appear on a day to day basis, they have been divided into two main traditional groups, namely, Romans and sans serifs.
In the Romans group, the typefaces can be divided into three families, namely, transitional, diagonal and vertical romans. Sans serifs are in turn divided into four families namely, neo-grotesque, geometric, grotesque and humanist.

Chapter 10: Images

This chapter discusses the revolution, history and development of the images. The genesis of images began way back during the Paleolithic era. The first type of images were found approximately 30000 years ago in caves. Later on, they were found in religious settings. The revolution of images gave birth to a new form of journalism. This is whereby the news networks use texts and pictures on a great deal to spread their messages. Currently, people have become participants in the media rather than consumers of information. However, due to amateurism, professionally taken photographs have begun to disappear. Advertising photographers are facing stiff competition because clients use their digital cameras to do the advertising job.
Images are used to build strong messages. Images, that build messages can be categorized into informative images, directive images, explicative images and expressive images. Informative images give relevant info without any value judgment. Explicative images explain an action, directive images indicate a particular opinion and expressive image communicate strong feelings.
The chapter also discusses the image rhetoric. This is the art of articulating a message captivatingly. An expert of the image rhetoric makes construction, function and status clear to the receiver. However, the images need to be placed in a particular context regardless of whether the sender uses explicative, informative, expressive or directive images.

Are these the best forms of visual communication?

In my opinion, these are the best forms of visual communication. Any person as long as he or she has good eye sight and can interpret the message will do that comfortably. Nevertheless, this form of communication is biased especially to people with eyesight. Therefore, in such instances, an alternative form of communication should be identified so that people with poor eye sight gets the message being driven across.
Actually, after going through the reading, the only thing that was running in my mind was of the notion that what will happen to those people who do not see? Will they also be able to interpret the message in then images or rather the typography?
As a designer, I will be forced to do more research on how I will be able to serve those people that do not see.

References

Bergström, B. (2008). Essentials of visual communication. London: Laurence King Pub.