Secular Panthers – Visual Rhetoric

My final project

The Outline

Secular Panthers & Baptist Campus Ministries: How Two Student Groups Use Similar Marketing Tactics to Accomplish Different Goals

I. Introduction
-Chris and I will explain the basis for our idea and what we hope to accomplish
II. Interviews
-Secular Panthers
*Dave Churvis – President
–Why did you design the flyer the way that you did?
–Explain how the logo best represents the group. (Dave will elaborate here on the conflict he endured when selecting the logo due to differing identities within the group at large)
*Sean Kirk
–Why the flyers attracted him to the club.

-BCM
*Chris’ interview segments

III. Conclusion
-What were the parallels we can draw between the two groups and their marketing techniques?
-What can be said about visual rhetoric when exploring these two groups?

McCloud Response

This cartoon, titled “Paranoid Right”, possesses a wealth of imagery and verbal implications. The cartoon depicts a man, apparently named Virgil, who, at the beginning of President Barack Obama’s second term, is seen peering suspiciously out of his window, firearms prepared, awaiting a fate he has invented in his own head.

I’ve always said that poetry is the pinnacle of verbal expression. Poetry is the most abbreviated, concise manner in which to convey a message. The ability to play with symbolism, metaphor, and complicated language within a poem makes it one of the most effective means of transmitting a hard-hitting message. Poetry can drive a moral, story, or criticism home more effectively than any other type of written word.

Political cartoons are the visual version of poetry to me. They may carry less artistic stock than formal art, but they manage to make massive claims about our global landscape in a significantly small amount of space.

In this cartoon, there is, as McCloud might point out, a perfect harmony between images and words. The expression on the man’s face is one of obvious suspicion and contempt. The frame-within-a-frame (the television screen) helps establish the setting and behind-the-scenes motivator for the scene itself. Further, the clothing and general style of the two human figures in the cartoon seems to indicate right-wing, southern people.

Then we have the text. The man’s wife points out that no one will be coming to steal his weaponry and force him into a homosexual union with an undocumented citizen (though her language is much less politically correct). In just one sentence, this cartoon manages to sum up the massive feeling of paranoia presented by the right-wing in terms of President Obama’s position in the White House. There remains an overwhelmingly ridiculous idea that regulating gun ownership means squashing the second amendment, that legalizing gay marriage must inevitably result in the compulsory practice of gay marriage, and that the left-wing is obsessively pro-“illegal citizen” just because they tend to believe that perhaps these people should be treated as human beings.

I think if McCloud were to view this cartoon, he would find the harmony between the text and the image spot-on. Further, I feel he would find the cartoon as a whole an excellent example of political commentary and concise story-telling without veering too far from the “real.”

Old Flyer vs. New Flyer

 

    

On the left is the old flyer and on the right is the new one. To begin the redesign process, I operated within GSU’s color and type guide and went for a more simplistic design. I chunked the important information and used color scheme to highlight the eye-catching words and phrases. Further, I wanted to call attention to the most significant question: Are you on track to graduate? It’s not a beautiful flyer but for an event like this, it serves its purpose.

 

 

Taking Type for Granted

If this article and general topic of discussion showed me anything, it’s that I never paid much attention to fonts. We’ve all been socially-constructed now via internet culture to hate Comic Sans but past that, I’m not sure I ever paid it much mind.

Looking at these two photos, however, I can certainly see a stark difference. There is a certain element lost, and I think the “Font Wars” article summed it up nicely: the new font looks cheap. I’m only 21 and from a suburb with the closest IKEA being the one in Atlantic Station. I had never heard of IKEA before coming to college in 2011. At that point, the new font was securely fashioned in its design. But I can’t help but wonder if my impressions would be different otherwise. The article spoke of IKEA as the pinnacle of design, and I’ve never seen it that way. IKEA to me has always been the college kid’s destination of desperation. Pottery Barn is well out of my reach for quite some time, and maybe forever, so IKEA it is. I’ve labored over an IKEA bookshelf and bed frame and now I live right across from it. A look out of my window during any given daylight hour shows me countless shoppers leaving with cheap but trendy furniture and the IKEA logo stares through at me like the eye of Mordor. The color scheme and the typeface are entirely recognizable, but I certainly agree that it sells an image of cheapness, not classy accessibility as I believe is likely their aim as a company.

I always thought that Twitter had a particularly appealing font and logo for the brand it is selling.

The font has that classic social media vibe–hip, current, but still somewhat professional. The color is an appealing, soft blue and the bird logo is memorable and charming. Overall, setting eyes on this font and overall logo helps Twitter sell itself and also differentiates itself in an effective way from anything else on the market.

 

The NIKE logo accomplishes similar goals with very different tactics. The swoosh is what NIKE is best known for, but the font is similarly powerful. It’s classic, angled, and bold. NIKE is a brand of athletic power. Renowned as the best sports materials brand on the market, it needs a font that expresses that level of power. With the four-letter title, it mirrors the goals of IKEA. Bold, inviting, and memorable are the accomplished goals of these types of fonts.

And we all know this one. Entirely different from IKEA, Twitter, or NIKE, this font expresses the entire premise of a restaurant like Chick-fil-A. This font just screams southern charm and good times. It speaks for itself.

 

Font is important. It’s the centerpiece of your logo. Next to color, it’s the most important aspect of your brand. You know who else really nailed it?

WordPress. This site is beautiful!

Bad flyer

Since January 2013, I have interned with the Public Relations Coordinator for the Honors College. Through this placement, I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot about effective marketing and advertising. She has taught me some basic Photoshop skills and some need-to-know basics when pertaining to flyers. I’ve even had the chance to make some of my own.

This particular flyer is from the Department of African-American Studies. The content itself is not so bad. Their language and amount of text is perfectly acceptable. It’s the other schematic elements that beg to be addressed.

First of all, this is a Georgia State University flyer. Our color and type guide dictates certain standards for marketing in general. These colors were weak attempts to mimic “GSU Blue” and the other colors expressed in the guide. Further, they completely abandon Gil Sans in favor of fonts that I would argue look cheap and a little childish.

Secondly, the excessive use of punctuation in the title already veers any onlookers from the direction of potentially taking the message seriously. The art of several exclamation and question marks is one usually implemented for elementary audiences… like maybe a flyer for a group of third graders. It serves a purpose in placing emphasis but it doesn’t serve the audience in this case.

Finally, a true mark of rudimentary graphic design is centering everything–which this flyer does. The layout of the page is difficult to read and look at in general.

It’s an unfortunate design fluke because the message and the event itself seem really valuable, but this value is lost in the midst of the design itself.

Berger

Ashton Brasher

Reading Response: Berger

                When reading through John Berger’s writing, I was struck with a realization that each author in discussion of visual rhetoric tends to define images in very explicit, precise ways. Berger describes them as “a sigh which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved—for a few moments or for a few centuries.” This raises a significant fact about images and their enduring strength. In terms of modern technology, this made me think of the difference between a Snapchat and a Facebook profile picture. A Snapchat is a briefly held photograph, meant to demonstrate for others a concise visual explanation of our activities or whereabouts. A Facebook profile picture, however, is the face that many in the year 2014 associate with us as people. Images, though from similar categories, can serve entirely different purposes and I think Berger’s definition illuminates that important fact.

 

                I was also particularly struck by Berger’s words on the different ways we interpret meaning within a visual piece. I took an Art History class during my sophomore year and remember marveling at the sheer confidence in every person who volunteered an analysis of the presented piece of art. Many of the paintings and sculptures we viewed were created by artists, with whom historians have little familiarity, many centuries ago. Yet, a group of college students in an introductory class felt confident defining both the meaning and the intentions behind the piece of art. I began to realize over the course of the semester that the differences in interpretations among the students was not so much based on any historical, artistic, or methodological analysis but instead on their individual experiences. While one female might view a painting of a woman with her baby as positive, another might catch a glint of somberness in the subject’s face. It would seem those sorts of views are much more heavily based on personal circumstances than a true understanding of the subject. But then again, what’s the difference?

 

                It is also interesting to note how the reception of images into pop culture can fully modify or even erase their original meaning, as displayed through Berger’s use of the Mona Lisa on the white t-shirt. This also brings him to a discussion of how replication can modify meaning. So much as even cropping an image can entirely alter our perception—a significant fact to note that will likely carry much weight as we continue in our discussion of visual rhetoric.

Reading Response 1/21/14

Ashton Brasher

Reading Response: Hill

            In his chapter, “The Psychology of Rhetorical Images”, Charles Hill opens with some specific guiding concepts and questions. He first, in so many words, asks the reader to consider the definition of visual rhetoric, even throwing out some likely unconsidered examples such as landscapes and memorials. Next, he guides the conversation into a more psychological standpoint, asking “How do images persuade?” (26). Asking this question leads to a deeper analysis of how images work and how the human psyche responds to them, and what bearing an emotional response possesses over our attitudes, beliefs, and most importantly, actions. Hill asserts that the belief that images serve only or primarily to evoke an emotional response has left them widely neglected in the field of rhetoric, as rhetorical studies often dictate avoiding the emotional in favor of the logical for the sake of rhetorical purity.

Hill challenges this notion by explaining why images are so crucial to the understanding of persuasion. He states, “…now that simple binary distinctions such as ‘emotional vs. rational’ have been problematized in the theoretical literature and demonstrated as invalid by much of the empirical research into cognitive and neurological processes has it become acceptable to treat rhetorical images as objects worth of serious study without feeling the need to deny their largely emotional nature” (27). However, with this in mind, Hill presents some challenges to visual persuasion and the difficulty of reaching individuals on an emotional level. Some of the barriers he presents include outside influences, prior-held beliefs, undeveloped analytical skills, etc.

Hill then discusses rhetorical presence in terms of visuals. When explaining the concept of presence in verbal rhetoric, he sates “the phenomenon of presence is often linked with visual perception” (Hill 29). This implies that visuals, whether physically present or mentally manifested, are crucial to the art of persuasion. He further indicates that visuals, especially photographs and videotape, are epistemologically the epitome of factual evidence, as they demonstrate that a condition is or was true at an exact point in time.

Hill then seeks to undermine the preconceived notions held about images vs. text, helping to blur the lines between what is often viewed as a stark binary. He cites psychological research proving that text and images can, interchangeably, elicit similar rational and emotional responses depending on their nature (for example, a bar graph vs. a descriptive poem). This knowledge allows for a discussion of vivid language and images and the persuasiveness achieved. Studies show that people are more likely to demonstrate an emotional response the more vivid or evocative the appeal. Finally, Hill delves into the true nature of advertising and visual persuasion with these key concepts in mind, discussing the idea that visual persuasion works best when it simply compels the viewer to carry out an action without really considering the motives. Hill describes images as “ubiquitous, powerful, and important” for this very reason as they have the power to compel viewers to action oftentimes with no real logical basis. This knowledge makes the study of visual rhetoric key so as to promote the responsible use of its power.