Joe Mackiewicz article What Technical Writing Students Should Know About Typeface Personality describes the importance of typeface in a document as a form of visual rhetoric.  Typeface choices such as broadway, garamond, verdana, or calibri can affect the tone and an artefacts ability to persuade its audience.  Mackiewicz comments that students need more guidance when it comes to typeface choices, as it is rarely taught and highly accessible with the use of computers, but only offers that technical writing should occur in fonts that are neutral and professional.  While this is appropriate ideal for technical writing, I can think of many typefaces that would fit into that catergory (calibri, cambria, times new roman, etc.) and Mackiewicz does little to guide a student into which of these typefaces may be more appropriate than the next.

Mackiwicz also mentions that certain fonts hold historical meanings that a writer should consider when choosing an appropriate typeface.  He mentions that the typeface helvetica "dredge[s] up the emotions and memories connected to the Helvetican IRS" as it is used on many government documents (9).  Many conventions of font exist from times before access to typeface was easy, which makes choosing fonts difficult when thinking historically.  Many fonts, as depicted below, are associated with certain brands.  One can easily distinguish the letter "G" representing Google and the "P" associated with the Playstation brand. 


 There are conventions dictated by the past that we still cling to in the age of computers.  Newspaper headlines are still created in an ornate manner, as was the convention of newspapers dating back to 1906 (depicted below on the left).  The New York Times still uses the same typeface for its headline, even though the paper now is able to integrate more use of visual rhetoric, with graphic and multiple typeface choices.  While it is not necessary for the New York Times to "cling" to its typeface, I think it lends to its ethos and the convention allows the reader to see the document as a newspaper without having to actually read any of the present text.  

                     
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  1. Very nice Shannon! I think that fonts are a little complicated. You are correct, Mackiewicz doesn't give us much information about the various fonts. I like how you displayed "broadway" as it takes me immediately to a place in my mind where I connect with a broadway production. The New York Times are exceptional pieces to put on display here. No one does a newspaper that says, New York, quite like the New York Times.

    I once worked with a couple of graphic artists and they knew their fonts very well. I sat close to them and would listen to "font conversation" from time to time. With the technology revolution we are living with, we take fonts for granted. They are on the drop-down menu for us to choose from. Sometimes we are frustrated with things like an email program that only gives us one or two choices of font. It just makes me want to know more about these fonts and who they are historically, and who chooses to use them while the rest of us use an email standard.

    Rosanne

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In class, we discussed Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," which is really the seminal work in well, understanding comics.  McCloud discusses just about every, and any aspect of comics that can be conceived, and our discussion on 'gutters' was interesting, as I hadn't read "Understanding Comics" in some ten years.

As an avid comics fan (buff?), I had always been told that Neal Adams was one of the genre-defining comics-book artists of his day (which happened to precede me by some 15 years).  As you can see in the examples to the right, his use of panel arrangement was completely "outside-the-box," to coin a phrase that came up in class.  That is not the interesting part, however.

Trap. The combination of the genres of trance and rap usually through sound mixing and editing, has become a staple of parties and festival shows. They share similar use of synth, heavy base and spoken words to create music. But what interests me out of these is the artwork and how the artwork mimics the mixing of themes between rap and techno much in the same way the music does.

Arguably one of the most recognizable symbols in the Western cultural lexicon, or even that of Eastern cultures, is the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. Popularized in the late 1920s by a series of short films, America’s favorite rodent has come to represent the Walt Disney Studios and the Disney corporation at large.

The above comic by Robert Berry appears in his Ulysses “Seen” adaptation of the James Joyce novel Ulysses.

We watched "The Machine is Us/ing Us" and had an interesting class discussion on whether it was a scholarly work or not. It was not, perhaps, “scholarly”; but it was an argument, and it made me think about the sociology of internet communication.

During our in-class discussion of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art," the composer brought up gutters, the space in between frames of a comic (or newspaper, cartoon or other media).  In a comic, as McCloud states in the image to the right, gutters "play host to the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics."  These gutters are vital, and can serve as more than a space to let the reader's mind wander.

When we talked in class about usability and the internet, it sounded like the conclusion as to what makes a usable website is simplicity. Creating a website to serve a very obvious purpose is the key to usability. But even when a site is usable, there are aesthetics that make a website a more enjoyable experience for the user. Color, formatting, and graphic elements can enhance usability by making a website visually appealing.

In Vitaly Friedman's article "10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of," the first item listed is  problematic hidden login links on websites. Friedman uses Backpack as an example because the login link is very small and placed right underneath a block of text that looks like an advertisement, rather than placing the login somewhere else on the page where it can be easily located.

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Of the recent readings for this course, I feel most compelled to comment on the writings of Jakob Nielsen. I had heard of him before, touted as the leading expert of usability. A great deal of the discussion in class was devoted to some apparent contradictions between his ethos and one of his now defunct websites. However, I noticed contradictions on the very page we were asked to look at for class.

Professor John Logie teaches us that comics have a place in academia. He teaches it in Visual Rhetoric. Why not? Comics are visual and they are graphic and they are certainly full of rhetoric. Comics teach us to engage ourselves with the comic we are viewing, on our own time, in our own space. Professor Logie teaches that Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" is an essential book to do just that, understand comics.
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