Context of Practice: Lecture 2 - Language of Design: Visual Literacy

This lecture was about how design is it's own visual language. For a language to work, there has to be an agreement amongst people that one thing will stand for another. The principles, vocabulary and grammar has to be learnt for this to happen. Visual language is the use of graphic design to communicate certain things to the public, and it provides the visual vocabulary needed for ideas, concepts and messages to be effectively communicated.

Everybody knows instantly that these symbols means female and male toilets, yet no words are used. This is visual literacy.

We aren't designing for our own sake, nor are we appealing to our fellow students with our designing. So we have to think globally and contextually with designing and try not to be stuck in our own bubbles of understanding.
Visual communication requires visual literacy. The seven principles of Visual literacy are:

• the ability to interpret, negotiate and make meaning from information presented in the formation of an image.
• it is based on the idea that pictures can be read.
• it is an agreement amongst a group of people that one thing will stand for another.
• the conventions that are a combination of universal and cultural symbols.
• being visually literate requires an awareness of the relationship between visual syntax and visual semantics.
• visual syntax, which is the visual organisation and the pictorial structure of elements, which affect the way we 'read' it.
• visual semantics, the way an image fits into a cultural process of communication. The meaning is created through elements such as cultural references and political or social ideals. 
• semiotics, which is the study of symbolism, signs and sign processes, communication and so on. It is closely related to the field of linguistics which studies the structure and meaning of language.

Visual semantics is the way an image fits into a cultural process of communication. An image of an apple is not actually an apple. It is a photograph or picture of an apple. You can't touch it and it has been edited to look that way, so therefore it is not an apple. Once you put a large apple next to a smaller apple and we ask ourselves what it is, it can be perceived as a "big apple". This then has connotations of New York... 'The Big Apple". This apple is a visual metaphor.

Image and symbols are METAPHORS - Apple and blackberry don't even make you think of fruit anymore, because they have visual literacy.
A visual metonym is a symbolic image that closely relates to something but isn't solely linked to it, for example yellow cabs make you think of New York.