When searching "Black, White, and Red" on Google Images, I noticed that the first related search was "black white and red weddings". Apparently this is a thing. Red, I guess I understood, but black? Caivano and Lopez in "The Rhetoric of black, white, and red" offer one explanation; that is, that the combination of red and black has an elegant feel. 


Scanning through the images the search brought up, there were also quite a few images of flowers - like roses - and "black white and red flowers" was also listed as a related search. Besides these, there were some ads that were certainly using "the seduction of color advertising". 

A main theme I noticed in between these other themes was rather dark, artsy pictures. The women with white faces, black hair and red lips, the man in a white shirt and black suit with blood on his arm and a red tie, or even a black bunny zipping into a bloody white bunny costume (?!?). This mix of red dresses, guns, blood, and peonies on achromatic backgrounds is unsettling, to say the least. Definitely more of a Dracula feel than a Jesus Christ feel. I have to say that these things always bring me back to the cover design of Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight": pale arms, black background, and that one red, red apple. Vampires.







The color scheme for vampires is really too perfect. You think of a vampire and there is red blood, white skin, and black clothes. But you also think elegant, don't you? Seductive? They've got their methods for drawing in the women. And the portrayal of vampires with these colors adds to the seductiveness and elegance of them, does it not?


 Maybe it's just what teen pop culture is in to right now, but this whole vampire craze affects more than just the sales of pointy fake teeth. It also affects how we might be viewing a color combination.
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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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