This brief, inexpensive paperback introduces students to the essential techniques and critical terms for analyzing and writing about visual culture. The Elements of Visual Analysis combines images, readings, and extensive definitions to develop students' abilities in analyzing two-dimensional and three-dimensional visual artifacts and experience. Designed primarily for courses in composition, rhetoric, and communications, the book will also fit any disciplines interested in engaging in serious analysis of visual phenomena.

The Art of Theatrical Design: Elements of Visual Composition, Methods, and Practice addresses the core principles that develop the student designer into a true artist, providing a foundation that ensures success with each production design. This text concentrates on the skills necessary to create effective, evocative, and engaging theatrical designs that support the play contextually, thematically, and visually. It gives students the grounding in core design principles they need to approach design challenges and make design decisions in both assigned class projects and realized productions. This book features: In-depth discussions of design elements and principles for costume, set, lighting, sound, and projection designs Coverage of key concepts such as content, context, genre, style, play structure and format, and the demands and limitations of various theatrical spaces Essential principles, including collaboration, inspiration, conceptualization, script analysis, conducting effective research, building a visual library, developing an individual design process, and the role of the critique in collaboration Information on recent digital drawing tool technology, such as the Wacom® Inkling pen, Wacom® Intuos digitizing tablets and digital sketching, and rendering programs such as Autodesk® Sketchbook Pro and Adobe® Photoshop® Chapter exercises and key terms designed to provide an engaging experience with the material and to facilitate student understanding

The Handbook of Visual Analysis is a rich methodological resource for students, academics, researchers and professionals interested in investigating the visual representation of socially significant issues. The Handbook: Offers a wide-range of methods for visual analysis: content analysis, historical analysis, structuralist analysis, iconography, psychoanalysis, social semiotic analysis, film analysis and ethnomethodology Shows how each method can be applied for the purposes of specific research projects Exemplifies each approach through detailed analyses of a variety of data, including, newspaper images, family photos, drawings, art works and cartoons Includes examples from the authors' own research and professional practice The Handbook of Visual Analysis, which demonstrates the importance of visual data within the social sciences offers an essential guide to those working in a range of disciplines including: media and communication studies, sociology, anthropology, education, psychoanalysis, and health studies.

The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page. In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

"This book aims to strengthen an understanding of the sculptural possibilities of form and space through developing a visual language and structure that recognizes and gives priority to 3-dimensional visual perception. It is written so as to apply to both the active process of shaping 3-D form and space and analyzing any existing visual situation."-- Introduction.

Visual communication shapes our perceptions and experiences of the world. This is not only a question of photographs or video, but also the design of websites, the use of data visualization software, the branding of packaging, and even the design of buildings and furniture. Doing Visual Analysis: From Theory to Practice provides a concrete set of tools to research and analyse this wide range of visual data. Showing students how to apply the right mix of methods to their own research projects, it equips them with the skills to break down and analyse the range of contemporary visual communication. The book: Provides examples of how and where certain tools can be used in a project or dissertation Discusses the type of research questions best suited to different tools and methods Shows students how to mix approaches and use tools alongside other methods, such as content analysis or interviews Doing Visual Analysis is an essential companion for students and researchers of visual data across the social sciences.

Visual Branding pulls together analyses of logos, typeface, color, and spokes-characters to give a comprehensive account of the visual devices used in branding and advertising. The book places each avenue for visual branding within a rhetorical framework that explains what that device can accomplish for the brand. It lays out the available possibilities for constructing logos and distinguishes basic types along with examples of their use and evolution over time.