Riechers Angela. Elements of Visual Grammar: A Designer's Guide for Writers, Scholars, and Professionals

Princeton University Press, 2024. — 241 p.Elements of Visual Grammar - A Designer's Guide for Writers, Scholars, and Professionals by Angela Riechers is a color-illustrated introduction to the basic principles of visual language that every content creator and consumer needs to know. Intelligent, easy to understand, and beautifully designed, with crisp writing and exceptional examples from a wide range of media―including graphic design, painting, photography, screen-based media, and products―The Elements of Visual Grammar opens the world of visual content to everyone. It should be on the desk of every creative person. A fresh, comprehensive guide, The Elements of Visual Grammar makes the basics of graphic design, visual communication, and image creation accessible to a wide audience. It provides clear instructions, tips, and ideas and is written in a friendly way, making it an ideal handbook for anyone, even those with no visual expertise, to pick up and understand. Accessible, inviting, and fun to read, The Elements of Visual Grammar is a great introduction to visual language and storytelling. Full of rich material, it feels like a conversation with a smart friend who is taking you by the hand and letting you make discoveries along the way. One of the book’s strongest features is its wealth of visual examples and detailed captions. I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much just from a book’s captions.The right images capture attention, pique curiosity, and inspire viewers to stick around long enough to read any accompanying text. Nearly everyone today needs to use or understand images in communications of all kinds, from the most formal professional publication to the most casual social media post, and knowing the basics of visual language is essential for content creators and consumers alike. However, most people aren’t taught visual grammar unless they go into art- or design-related fields. The Elements of Visual Grammar explains image use in any media in practical terms for writers, scholars, and other professionals. Award-winning art director and design professor Angela Riechers offers a flexible set of principles and best practices for selecting images that work―and using them in the most persuasive way. The result is an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to learn how to work more successfully with images and words.• Features more than 200 color illustrations―drawn from a wide range of styles, media, and eras―that demonstrate the principles of visual grammar and how images can support and enhance written content
• Defines and illustrates the basic elements of images, describes how images function within text regardless of media, and explains how to choose images and integrate them with text
• Introduces the practical, cultural, conceptual, and scientific factors that influence image use
• Analyzes images by function and describes ways to employ symbolism, synecdoche, allegory, metaphor, analogy, and iconographyUnderstanding the structure and meaning of visual language aids our ability to both communicate and comprehend. Worldwide visual culture has never been so rich and varied, and at the same time so cluttered with images that are poorly deployed, ill-chosen, or just plain ineffectual. Careless image choices diminish the impact of written content and sometimes operate at cross-purposes to its intended message, sabotaging the author’s best intentions and weakening their intellectual position. On the other hand, well-chosen images capture attention, pique curiosity, reel viewers in, and inspire them to stick around to read the text. Just as there are rules of grammar for written language, there are rules of visual grammar for images. This book establishes a baseline structure to guide the broad array of scholars, professors, and graduate and undergraduate students—and the extended community of professionals including librarians, journalists, publishers, and others who surround them—who
increasingly rely on graphic material to supplement their written work and want to feel more confident in their image choices. This volume lays out the fundamentals of visual style to impart a solid understanding of the underlying basic principles for image use, leaving deeper analyses of semiotics, psychological and social patterns of looking/seeing, critical theory, and media history for those in more specialized fields of study. Images support text by adding a separate dimension of their own (rather than by merely repeating what the words say) and providing a richer, more nuanced understanding. But here’s the catch: images are far more open to multiple interpretations than the written word because they are inherently more ambiguous. The same image can say very different things depending on context.Table of Contents
IntroductionI Basics of Visual Grammar
What Is Visual Grammar?
Composition
Active Surfaces
ColorII Strategies
How Images Support Text
Conceptual Strategies
Visual Grammar for Photography
Visual Grammar for Illustrations
Putting It All TogetherBibliography
Illustration Credits
Index