Visual rhetoric in information design: designing for credibility and engagement

Genre plays a central role in defining the visual conventions designers draw upon for presenting information and influencing the ways in which users, in turn, experience and interpret information. Drawing on evidence from user research, this chapter examines the rhetorical associations of some of the typographic and layout conventions associated with good practice in information design

Pro-Resume: The Infographic Resume Builder

Scoring an interview is a challenge for any job seeker these days, thus having a unique and well-organized resume is crucial to grab a recruiter’s attention. Online resume builders such as ResumeNow and VisualizeMe have been created to help users build resumes; however, their templates are lacking in quantity, customizability, and in some instances, even legibility. Thus, our team set out to create an infographic online resume builder, a web application that allows its users to build, organize, and beautify their resumes to aid them in their job search. Our system allows for easy integration with their LinkedIn profiles so that their work history can be easily duplicated without typing everything out. There is also a large scope of infographic template options that users can choose from and, most importantly, users will have the ability to further customize their content and organization by using the system’s editing mode

Transforming Narratives

Narrative, often considered synonymous with “story,” can be viewed from a structuralist perspective and analyzed independent of any particular content. Breaking narrative into categories of story and discourse, this autonomous structure makes possible a translation of content from one form to another. The various media and form types common in graphic design can serve as both recipient and translator of narratives, converting content into a framework that includes the concept of craftsmanship, aesthetic components and specifications, legibility and composition, and the physical form of the designed object. To examine how this framework functions in practice, I have developed a series of three volumes in which cinematic tropes are represented in book form based on a morphology of traits

Graphic design as urban design: towards a theory for analysing graphic objects in urban environments

This thesis presents a model for analysing the graphic object as urban object, by considering atypical fields of discourse that contribute to the formation of the object domain. The question: what is graphic design as urban design? directs the research through an epistemological design study comprising: an interrogation of graphic design studio practice and the articulation of graphic design research questions; a review and subsequent development of research strategy, design and method towards the articulation of methodology that reflects the nature of the inquiry; a detailed analysis of five different ways to study and research graphic design as urban design, in geography, language, visual communication, art and design, and urban design. The outcome of the investigation is a model that enables future research in the urban environment to benefit from micro-meso-macrographic analysis. The model endeavours to provide a way to evaluate, design and enhance ‘public places and urban spaces’ (Carmona et al., 2010) by considering different scales of symbolic thought and deed. This has been achieved by acknowledging the relationship between the relatively miniscule detail of graphic symbolism, the point at which this becomes visible through increased scale, and the instances when it dominates the urban realm. Examples are considered that show differences between, for example, the size and spacing of letter shapes on a pedestrian sign, compared to the ‘visual’ impact of an iconic building in the cityscape. In between is a myriad of graphic elements that are experienced and designed by many different professional disciplines and occupations. These are evidenced and explained. Throughout the study an indiscriminating literature review is interwoven with the text, accompanied by tabular information, and visual data in the form of photographs and diagrams. This is mainly research-driven data utilising photographs from fieldwork in Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, United Kingdom, and United States of America. The methodology integrates a transdisciplinary adaptive theory approach derived from sociological research, with graphic method (utilising a wider scope of visual data usually associated with graph theory). The following images provide sixteen examples of artefacts representing the graphic object as urban object phenomenon

Typeface Legibility: Towards defining familiarity

The aim of the project is to investigate the influence of fa- miliarity on reading. Three new fonts were created in order to examine the familiarity of fonts that readers could not have seen before. Each of the new fonts contains lowercase letters with fa- miliar and unfamiliar skeleton variations. The different skeleton variations were tested with distance threshold and time thresh- old methods in order to account for differences in visibility. This investigation helped create final typeface designs where the fa- miliar and unfamiliar skeleton variations have roughly similar and good performance. The typefaces were later applied as the test material in the familiarity investigation. Some typographers have proposed that familiarity means the amount of time that a reader has been exposed to a typeface design, while other typographers have proposed that familiarity is the commonalities in letterforms. These two hypotheses were tested by measuring the reading speed and preference of partici- pants, as they read fonts that had either common or uncommon letterforms, the fonts were then re-measured after an exposure period. The results indicate that exposure has an immediate ef- fect on the speed of reading, but that unfamiliar letter features only have an effect of preference and not on reading speed. By combining the craftsmen’s knowledge of designing with the methods of experimental research, the project takes a new step forward towards a better understanding of how different type- faces can influence the reading process

Toward New Ecologies of Cyberphysical Representational Forms, Scales, and Modalities

Research on tangible user interfaces commonly focuses on tangible interfaces acting alone or in comparison with screen-based multi-touch or graphical interfaces. In contrast, hybrid approaches can be seen as the norm for established mainstream interaction paradigms. This dissertation describes interfaces that support complementary information mediations, representational forms, and scales toward an ecology of systems embodying hybrid interaction modalities. I investigate systems combining tangible and multi-touch, as well as systems combining tangible and virtual reality interaction. For each of them, I describe work focusing on design and fabrication aspects, as well as work focusing on reproducibility, engagement, legibility, and perception aspects

A review of assistive technology and writing skills for students with physical and educational disabilities

In recent years effective instruction in reading for learners with physicaland educational disabilities has received great attention in the schools.However, instruction in the corollary skill of writing has received considerably less emphasis. This review paper notes that through the use of assistive technology, students with a variety of physical and educationaldisabilities can learn to effectively (a) plan and organize their writing,(b) draft and transcribe their work, and (c) edit and revise their narrativeand expository writing.With teachers increasingly being held accountable for the development ofliteracy skills in all students, including those students with physical and educational disabilities, schools are paying substantial and growing attention to reading. The expressive side of the literacy coin, writing skills, is arguably equally significant and worthy of instructional emphasis. However, there are growing indicators that writing has not received enough attention in the national educational reform debate (National Commission on Writing, 2003, 2006; National Writing Project & Nagin, 2006). Along with reading comprehension, writing skill is a powerful predictor of academic success (Graham & Perin, 2007), and is an effective means of developing higher-order thinking skills (National Writing Project & Nagin, 2006). Writing helps learners make sense of the world (e.g., “Letters from Ground Zero,” cited in National Commission on Writing, 2006). Yet to date the teaching of writing skills to students with disabilities, including physical disabilities, has not received the level of curricular emphasis that teaching reading skills has (Graham & Perin, 2007). For students with physical and educational disabilities, stronger writing skills offer a variety of benefits. These include (a) more successful academic inclusion outcomes, (b) transfer of improved literacy skills to reading, and (c) greater pass rates on high stakes academic testing. As more and more careers require greater levels of literacy skills, students with disabilities who are unable to write effectively may find themselves increasingly minimized in these adult roles. Writing is considered to be an essential “threshold skill” for hiring and promotion (National Commission on Writing, 2003), and is a basic requirement for participation in civic life and the global economy (Graham & Perin, 2007; National Commission on Writing, 2003). This paper reviews the use of a variety of assistive technologies in enhancing writing skills in students with physical and educational disabilities

Practice, principles, and theory in the design of instructional text

This study is concerned with an analysis of the research arising from three quite different perspectives on instructional text - the `physical characteristics' research (legibility, layout, and readability), the `improvement of text' research (visual illustrations, adjunct aids, and typographical cueing), and the `learning theories' research (representation of knowledge, human memory, and quality of learning). From this analysis there is synthesised principles for the design of instructional text against which heuristic practice in text design is evaluated and from which a nascent theory of instructional text design is evolved. The principles derived from the various research perspectives provide a basis for the manipulation of text design elements in order to ensure that (a) existing knowledge in the reader can be activated, and (b) new knowledge can be assimilated in a manner facilitative of comprehension by (i) presentation in a structured and organised way, and (ii) appropriately highlighted through verbal and typographic cueing supported, as required, by verbal illustration and organisation. The emerging theory of instructional text design suggests: a topical analysis to determine the heirarchic relationship of ideas within the topic and the desired learning outcomes or objectives; a consideration of the linguistic aspects of the text; a consideration of the role of visual illustrations; and a consideration of the physical parameters of the text. These activities are concerned, respectively, with the design areas of structure and organisation, readability, visual illustration, and legibility, and are summed up in the acronym SORVIL

A Content Analysis Study of the Equivalency of Publishers' Easy Reader Leveling Systems

This study examines the book and text features and language and literary features of easy reader books. Leveled easy readers published by HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster were analyzed. The results reveal trends in the difficulty of sixteen book characteristics. The coding scores derived from content analysis were used to compare the leveling systems employed by the publishers. The study culminated in the creation of an equivalency chart that can be used to quickly compare the difficulty of easy readers on each level assigned by HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Children's librarians, school media specialists, and parents may use the equivalency tool developed during this study to assist them in selecting books for beginning readers

Passive visual behavior modifiers and consumer psychophysiology online.

Through an examination of the electroencephalography (EEG) data collected from 27 university students, this study examined the efficacy of three known passive visual behavior modifiers -- color, layout, and motion -- in an e-commerce environment. These three variables have significant scholarly support in the context of traditional media, but their effect online is still largely unsubstantiated. Using EEG readings taken from regions of interest Fp1 and Fp2, the researcher attempted to measure and compare sustained evoked response upon exposure to six fictitious e-commerce web pages, each exhibiting a different passive visual behavior modifier. It was hypothesized that (H1) a product in a subtle state of motion, (H2) a greater proportion of image to text, and (H3) a color system with a dominant wavelength of approximately 650nm would evoke higher average levels of amplitude (μV) and frequency (Hz) in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex compared to stimuli exhibiting inverse properties: a static product image, a greater proportion of text to image, and a color system with a dominant wavelength of approximately 490nm. The biofeedback measurement was supplemented by a qualitative interview. Participant responses were analyzed for key words, phrases, and trends related to consumer attitude and product preference. While no significant differences were found between the visual stimuli, this study provides insight, limitations, and direction for future psychophysiological research relating to e-commerce.--Abstract