christopher de la Torre

I got to thinking about the employment of design in print and online (electronic) publications. Professional writers have been taught about colors and lines and how to situate graphics and text, but what does it all really mean? Is design merely meant to comfort the reader through her journey across the page (or through cyberspace) or is there something more to be said about the spectrum of visual intensity?

Charles Kostelnick writes mainly from a business perspective in his piece “A Systematic Approach to Visual Language in Business Communication.” I believe his strategies can be used in many situations, not merely those governed by commerce. Rhetorical situations occur in every type of communication, no matter how formal or informal. We all want people to hear what we have to say when we have something to say, whether it’s expressed in an interoffice memo, a tag sale flyer, a love letter, or a blog. If we create something for others to see, chances are we want to cause a reaction. At the very least, the reaction would be to keep reading. According to Ignace Gelb, “writing does not communicate until it is seen, until it becomes an artifact for visual inspection” [1]. Obviously.

In 1980, when this statement was worth making, print was paramount. There was no desktop publishing. There were no blogs. I’m guessing people took special care when they presented their writing to audiences. And why wouldn’t they? After all, it may have taken all night to put together a presentation or report that would take us about two hours to construct in Microsoft Word or Powerpoint today. But no matter how much time and care was devoted to such a task, there was only so much one could do with a typewriter. My guess is that people didn’t go to great lengths to include images to their communications, and they certainly didn’t have the option of changing font colors or sizes (maybe with the exception of red on some typewriters). The point here is that publications are now being made to accommodate a host of rhetorical situations, some situations that were not so easily accommodated before. What does this mean?

Today, everyone’s a publisher in his or her own right. Desktop publishing has produced numerous software programs that make it easy to exercise our creativity. Blogging has made it even easier for us to produce electronic texts online. We don’t even have to worry about learning HTML code anymore. The high visual intensity made possible by these programs might suggest we humans are looking for ways to send each other more complex pieces of information via text. Who knows for sure? Kostelnic writes, “[a]t the high end of the visual continuum, designing and seeing assume a far greater role in sharing and receiving the message” [2]. Designing publications in this tech forward age isn’t the same as creating the wheel or making fire. There isn’t a set of instructions that, if followed, will ensure an audience will read our piece. According to Kostelnick, “each document embodies an autonomous system requiring adaptation to a particular audience and purpose” [3]. So, what is to stop us from botching it all up?

There may not be instructions for creating the perfect document (that would imply that whoever wrote those instructions could predict any rhetorical situation and project the trajectory from message to ideal outcome), but there are guidelines to follow to ensure our readers won’t defect mid message to another fuzzier, rounder, more beautiful one. To mediate these guidelines, someone somewhere recognized three distinct modes of visual language: alphanumeric/symbolic, graphic, supratextual, and spatial. Kostelnick provides a wonderful breakdown of these modes in Peeples [4]. “The ‘atmosphere value’ or ’semantic quality’ of typefaces. . . opens the door to subjectivity and rhetorical judgment” [5]. If indeed the acceptable style of information design is dictated by the status quo (implied here), what is to say acceptable styles in typographical presentation won’t shift as frequently as current styles of apparel or automobiles or make-up? Is Eurostyle the new bell-bottom? Is white space the new black? And where does DeLorian fit into all of this?

Style is taking over communication. In this tech forward age it’s all about aesthetics. We humans like pretty things with rounded edges to ensure we won’t cut ourselves. We, especially in this tech forward age, don’t care much to strain ourselves. We don’t want to move around a page or document if we don’t have to. Laboring over information in a document is like walking two miles in a blizzard to buy groceries. Our grandparents may have had to do it, but we don’t have to. And why should we? There really is no reason to; the progression of technology has made sure of it. There was a time when informal and formal communication was blind to itself. Now that design has crept into communication by way of glorious advances in technology, it’s just as important for us to dress up our text as it is to comb our hair before leaving the apartment before work. But we shouldn’t look at this as a laborious task; let’s have fun designing our documents. After all, it’s not all about dressing up in a suit and tie anymore.

Works cited
[1] Kostelnick, C. (2003). A Systematic Approach to Visual Language in Business Communication. Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Readings from the Field. Ed. T. Peeples. New York, Longman. 271-86. (271).
[2] Kostelnick, 272.
[3] Kostelnick, 271-72.
[4] Kostelnick, 274.
[5] Kostelnick, 280.