Project Proposal

Visual Rhetoric Theory-Cynthia and Teri

Our project will be focusing on media and how text, visual images and genre plays an important part in what people see. The readings from Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World gave many good examples on how our world has changed over time. In this class we’ve learned to show how media or images can have a different meaning when there is a lot of text or none at all. Sometimes media doesn’t have to have text at all to get the meaning across but at the same time one word can make a difference in whether a person understands it all. Also, the location or how the media is presented is also key. A company selling men’s hair products obviously wouldn’t place an advertisement in Cosmopolitan which is clearly directed towards woman. According to Hill, one needs to ensure that verbal, visual and oral illiteracies are all equal and one mode does not isolate the others. We also agree with this because sometimes there can be too much texts or visuals in an ad that takes away from the media itself.
In Kress’ reading, “we live in a new communicational world and that there are now choices about how what is to be represented should be represented in what mode, in what genre, in what ensembles of modes of genres and on what occasions.” The reading also stated that everything has a purpose and different meanings behind what is represented by the colors people choose or where the writing or visual is placed in particular media. In order to show this, Cynthia and I propose to make a video documenting how media has changed over the past few years in advertisements and how it affects our daily activities. We plan to show different advertisements in magazines, television and billboards and show how the location or the design of it gets the meaning across clearly. We will relate the visual rhetoric theory with this because people walk by certain things everyday and never really think about what they see and actually analyze it. We will probably interview people and show them an ad or image and see if they understand it or ask them if there should be more visuals or text to make it more clear. This theory is very interesting because in the book, they used an example of how Microsoft word uses images on their tool bar instead of words for all of it and how it makes so much of a difference or even on a web page. If a web page takes too long downloading all the images, people usually just go to another one. At different times, visuals are more helpful than actually seeing the word right there in front of you. With our video, we want to show how this does make a difference in people lives and affects their daily activities whether they realize it or not. Our video will be more of a documentary of how media has changed over time by how things are designed a certain way.

We plan on working together with filming different people and advertisements as well as the editing. Our project will be equally split.