One thing that has stuck with me from the readings so far this semester was the Phillips articles claim that advertising has steadily relied more and more on images to sell products. Various ways of using images were examined and some of these are quite sophisticated, occupying different arenas of richness and complexity. The typology of visual rhetoric provided shows nine distinct types of images as visual rhetoric. Furthermore, according to Phillips the more complex the visual structure and the richer the meaning operation, the more successful the ad will be. When comparing such complexity with old advertisements, it is obvious to me that marketers have adopted a lot more refined toolkit. When I think of old advertisements, there is usually an image of the product or a person using it accompanied by some sort of tagline and a large block of text explaining the product. Modern ads utilize artificial images to convey the products capabilities. For example, the tide ad where the cup of detergent contained an image of clouds is a sophisticated metaphor that needs no additional information other than the name of the product. Reading text to be convinced is both time consuming and by no means guaranteed. By utilizing visual methods of persuasion, the target audience absorbs the message quickly and almost unintentionally and is thus persuaded much more readily. It is easy to see why advertisement has steadily shifted towards using sophisticated images rather than text to sell products—it affects us almost without our consent.

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  1. Advertising. A very interesting topic. In 2013 we learn that there is rhetoric in advertising. If I were shopping for a builder for a new home, I want visuals and text. I will have questions. When I see a Tide ad, I already know what Tide is and how stinky the laundry detergent aisle is in the market. I confess, I sign up for product updates and am amazed at the new ads. I like the coupons, but I have to remember that there are teenagers who are coming of age and who will soon be buying old traditional products like Tide. We are spoiled. We love photography and artistry. Not all of us can draw a pic that is worthy of being placed on advertising. Thanks for allowing me to ramble. I love your post, "it affects us almost without our consent" I think that many do affect us entirely without our consent.
    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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