OUGO401 Visual Communication Lecture

Context of Practise

- Visual Literacy: The language of Visual Culture


Visual Communication:    

- The process of sending and receiving messages 
- Understanding of signs, symbols, gestures and objects
- Affected by audience, context, media and method of distribution 

Visual Literacy: 

- The ability to contract 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 
- The ability to interpret, negotiate and make meaning
- Based on the idea that pictures can be read
- Agreement between a group of people that one thing will stand for another for any language to exist 
- The conventions of visual communication are a combination of cultural and universal symbols

• Visual Syntax    

- Refers to the pictorial structure and visual organisation and of images, it represents the basic building block of an image and how we read it

• Visual Semantics

- The semantics of an image refers to the way an image fits into a cultural pro cress of communication. It includes the relationship between form and meaning and the way meaning is created through cultural references, social ideals, religious beliefs, political ideas, historical structures etc. 

• Semiotics

In the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification and communication


- Symbol (Logo)
- Sign (Identity) 
- Signifier (Brand)

• Visual Synecdoche  

- Term is applied when a part is used to represent the whole, or vice versa
- The main subject is simply substituted for something that is inherently connected to it

• Visual Metonym

- Is a symbolic image that is used to make reference to something with a more literal meaning

• Visual Metaphor

- Used to transfer the meaning from one image to another
- 'Work the Metaphor,' every object has the capacity for something other than what is apparent