Thomas Kryton (bio)

"Designing Visual Language" provides a basic understanding of the principles of communication whether that is expressed as textual or graphical information. The book centers around the premise that a design is part of a rhetorical situation. Where a rhetorical situation is composed of an audience, a purpose and a context.

The authors define the audience as who will be viewing your design, what is their experience, educational background, what cultural group do they belong to and what position they might hold in an organization. They also examine what is the purpose of the document; is it instructional, a call to action, instructions required to perform a task or persuade them to change their attitudes about a situation. Context covers the when and where the design will be viewed, and considers such things as viewing distance, the situation whether it's a playroom where a child is required to build a birdhouse, a workshop where the document will be hung on a wall or a computer monitor.

The book also covers the various cognitive strategies that will help a designer analyze their work and includes; arrangement, emphasis, clarity, conciseness, tone, and ethos. Arrangement is one of the cognates discussed and focuses on creating a structure and hierarchy in the design which will establish a viewing order in the document. Emphasis covers what is prominent in the design and controlling eye flow. Design ambivalence and how easy it is for a viewer to decode your message are covered under clarity. Conciseness, does the design satisfy the rhetorical situation, does it hold up at various levels from a logo to a web site. The tone of a document refers to quite simply its voice, friendly, authorative, business-like, playful, and how the tone can influence the audience with either positive or negative consequences. Lastly ethos discusses how the designer can build credibility with their audience and how the designer establishes trust. The cognitive strategies are examined in relation to the rhetorical situation with examples that the authors use to describe the interaction between the ideas presented in the book.

Design is examined over various levels ranging from business cards, annual reports and web design discussing methods and at various levels from intra-level to supra-level design. With an examinations of visual and verbal conventions and how they can add or detract from the rhetorical situation and the "gestalt principles of design" discussing; visual noise, figure-ground relationships, patterns, and groupings, again in relation to how they satisfy the rhetorical situation.

The book also includes a notes section at the end of each section along with exercises that the reader can use to further investigate the ideas presented in the book.

While "Designing Visual Language" appears to be aimed primarily at technical writers at the early university/college course level it offers graphic designers a good foundation or refresher in some of the basics of what a design should accomplish and a methodology for getting there. Also it provides a vocabulary that a designer can use to describe to their clients the purpose and goal of their design. Although it has been written with an audience of technical communicators in mind it's one book that I wish had been presented in some of my early design courses.

Digital Paint Graphic and Web Design