What I Learned in this Class

This class has been the most challenging graduate level course I have taken. Most courses in this program are devoted to reading and writing, and they came fairly easily to me, since I am a verbal person. In visual communication, I felt out of my element. I was especially challenged when I needed to visually communicate using technology. The learning curve was steep, but it makes me prouder of the work that I produced, since I had to put in a lot of extra effort.

While I wouldn't say that I personally feel that a picture is worth a thousand words, I have a greater understanding of the importance of visual communication. I have to come back to the key principle of this program: the audience is key. Some people, like me, are verbal learners and need words (whether written or oral) to understand information. But others are visual learners, and for them pictures may be even more important than words. Since we may not know whether our audience members are visual or verbal learners, it's important to integrate words and images into our communications. This class has helped me develop the tools to create visuals to enhance my written communications. (I admit that I still feel visuals are there primarily to enhance words, although I know some people would argue that they can be forms of communication unto themselves or that words may serve to enhance images.)

Kress and Van Leeuwen, while they introduced a lot of terms that were sometimes hard to keep straight, really helped me with my understanding of images by relating them to language. My college career has mainly been focused on languages (I have a B.A. in French and this program is in the English department), so when this explanation of a "grammar of visual design" made me feel like I was in familiar territory. I would highly recommend this book to others who come to visual communication from a linguistic background.

Overall, this course has been challenging, but I feel that the knowledge I gained was well worth the effort. I am now much more conscious of visuals, and I have no doubt that the skills I learned will be valuable in my future career(s).

Media as Meaning

I'm surprised that chapter 7 didn't come earlier in the book, since it seems to me a fundamental principle that the means of creating a message, whether visual or verbal, affect the meaning of the message. Kress and Van Leeuwen mention three major classes of production technologies: technologies of the hand, technologies of the eye, and synthesizing technologies (p. 217). They also mention that we may be getting back to using the body. There is already technology for dictating into a computer instead of typing and using the hand instead of buttons, e.g. the iphone.

When I was in elementary school we spent several years learning to write in cursive, but I never use this medium today except when signing forms. I immediately reverted back to print once I was allowed, and now my main means of written communication involves typing. But perhaps in the future typing will become as obsolete as cursive writing as we get to the point where dictating into a computer becomes commonplace. There will probably be new production technologies that we can't even imagine today. I think it's important not to get too accustomed to one type of technology; instead we have to keep in mind that technology is constantly changing and may be cyclical (as we are using technologies of the hand in conjunction with computers.)

Modality and Reality

This idea of reality is something we have discussed in MAPC classes before. Kress and Van Leeuwen essentially say the same thing: "What is regarded as real depends on how reality is defined by a particular social group." In other words, reality is socially constructed. This was pretty simple for me to understand, but once the authors went into modality, I began to get confused.

The section on color made sense when I applied it to the work I did with the digital remix project. I was trying to combine bodies, and I had to play with the color hues and saturation to make the skin tone match (or come close to matching. I don't think I ever got an exact match.) I understood representation, illumination, and brightness fairly well, but the short section on depth confused me. I thought I understood the concept of depth fairly well (for someone who has not taken art classes since 8th grade), but the terminology was difficult. What is an angular-isometric perspective and how does it differ from a frontal-isometric perspective? Also, I have no idea what a fish eye perspective is. Could anyone help clear this up for me?

This chapter also made me think about reality when it comes to the media. People we see on TV tend to be far more attractive than those we encounter in real life. Female actresses, in particular, are often very skinny. Does this make their beauty unreal? In a sense it does, when you consider the airbrushing and digital remastering that is done. This creates an ideal that is impossible for a regular person to achieve.

In response to this, Dove has launched a campaign for real beauty. They depict larger, curvier women in their underwear in an attempt to show us that there is beauty to be found in different body types. Here is an example. Is this picture more realistic than the celebrity shots we see on the covers of magazines? What do you think?