Visual Communication Images with Messages 9th Edition

Book excerpt: Visual Communication Images with Messages, 9th Edition offers students, academics, professionals, and consumers of mass communication a way to better see and understand mediated images that persuade, entertain, and educate. By looking at illustrations through six perspectives-personal, historical, technical, ethical, cultural, and critical-there is a better understanding of why many pictures are forgotten and why some are always remembered by those who create and others who appreciate visual messages. Specifically, the chapters devoted to typography, graphic design, data visualizations, cartoons, photography, motion pictures, television, computers, and the web offer detailed reasons why images are important to mass communication through a six-perspective framework. Other chapters detail the general topics of visual cues and their importance in noticing pictures, visual theories that help explain image effects, visual persuasion for commercial and political purposes, visual stereotypes that injure, but others that offer positive examples, and visual analysis in which readers learn how to deconstruct images and appreciate illustrations that are seen in the mass media so their work is more lasting and meaningful.