2. Icebreaker
To start today, let’s talk about the very
first piece of visual art you can
remember designing.
Dr. Phill created his own comic book
when he was seven. It was awful.

3. Defining visual
rhetoric
Our starting point for the
semester will be this:
defining visual rhetoric. I’ll
be opening a Word
document to take notes as
we talk. But first, a few quick
slides with some elements to
consider.

4. Rhetoric is…
…"the faculty of discovering in any
particular case all of the available
means of persuasion.”
-Aristotle
…”the basic function of rhetoric [is]
the use of words by human agents to
form attitudes or to induce actions in
other human agents.”
-Burke
More! And citation for these two.

5. And Visual…
Adjective
1.of or pertaining to seeing or sight: a
visual image.
2.used in seeing: the visual sense.
3.optical.
4.perceptible by the sense of sight;
visible: a visual beauty.
5.perceptible by the mind; of the nat
ure of a mental vision: a visual impres
sion captured in a line of verse.

6. YOUR DEFINITION HERE.

7. So let’s talk
about why
The visual
matters
One of the easiest places to
go to see the essence of
visual rhetoric is to look at
posters. Let’s look at a series
of movie posters from the
last year, compliments of
Empire magazine.

8. And from that…
Let’s work on design activity one. Turn
to the website at
phillalexander.com/vis. Notice that the
header is… not fantastic.
Please form groups so that someone in
your group knows how to use either
InDesign or Photoshop to the point
that you can edit images.
Group up– no less than 2, no more
than 3.

9. Make a better
banner!
Thinking about what we’ve discussed so
far, make a more compelling, useful, visually
pleasing banner for the course website.
The image needs to be 160 pixels high and
should be roughly 1200 wide (though it can
repeat, or be shorter).

10. For Next Time
For Tuesday:
Read: Wysocki “The Multiple Media of Texts” and
“With Eyes That Think and Compose and Think,”
Barthes “Rhetoric of the Image,” Benjamin “The
Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical
Reproduction,” (all on Niihka) and Kress
“Reading Images”
Remember your design task, your reading
response (make sure for next week you respond
to THIS set of readings), and don’t forget to work
on the InDesign tutorials.