Monday, May 23, 2011

Visual Rhetoric

Visual Rhetoric is about persuasion. For example if you want to sell your house using balloons and having an open house will bring more attention than the house for sell with just a sign in the yard. Using bright colors, bold lettering, and pictures is often more appealing and draws attention to what every the visual may be trying to represent. There are many different ways to look at visual rhetoric, there are black and white visuals that rely on shading to get the right mood. Also visuals get store in our brain both in our short term and long term memories. Long term memories are things that you see all the time and can picture in our heads because we "archive" it into our memory. Then are short term visuals that you see once or twice and can vaguely remember. Visual rhetoric is what food chains and department stores use to catch our attention so we purchase their product instead of the competitors.

The example I have pasted below is a persuasion that Mac computers are better than Windows. They represent this by showing an old junk car by the Windows symbol, and the Mac symbol by the nice new car.

1 comment:

  1. I like the way that you started out your blog by using the example of baloons at an open house. The reason I like this example is because it was not a description of a picture but you created a visual image with it. I also liked the way that you expalined that visual rhetoric involves the use of colors, fonts and pictures. One thing that I would do to improve your blog woudl be to incorporate examples of rhetorical gazes into it. For example your picture if the Mac advertisement is a great example of a consumer gaze.

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