Both a primer on visual language and a visual dictionary of the fundamental aspects of graphic design, this text deals with every imaginable visual concept, making it an indispensable reference for beginners and seasoned visual thinkers alike.

A color-illustrated introduction to the basic principles of visual language that every content creator and consumer needs to know The right images capture attention, pique curiosity, and inspire viewers to stick around long enough to read any accompanying text. Nearly everyone today needs to use or understand images in communications of all kinds, from the most formal professional publication to the most casual social media post, and knowing the basics of visual language is essential for content creators and consumers alike. However, most people aren’t taught visual grammar unless they go into art- or design-related fields. The Elements of Visual Grammar explains image use in any media in practical terms for writers, scholars, and other professionals. Award-winning art director and design professor Angela Riechers offers a flexible set of principles and best practices for selecting images that work—and using them in the most persuasive way. The result is an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to learn how to work more successfully with images and words. Features more than 200 color illustrations—drawn from a wide range of styles, media, and eras—that demonstrate the principles of visual grammar and how images can support and enhance written content Defines and illustrates the basic elements of images, describes how images function within text regardless of media, and explains how to choose images and integrate them with text Introduces the practical, cultural, conceptual, and scientific factors that influence image use Analyzes images by function and describes ways to employ symbolism, synecdoche, allegory, metaphor, analogy, and iconography

A color-illustrated introduction to the basic principles of visual language that every content creator and consumer needs to know The right images capture attention, pique curiosity, and inspire viewers to stick around long enough to read any accompanying text. Nearly everyone today needs to use or understand images in communications of all kinds, from the most formal professional publication to the most casual social media post, and knowing the basics of visual language is essential for content creators and consumers alike. However, most people aren't taught visual grammar unless they go into art- or design-related fields. The Elements of Visual Grammar explains image use in any media in practical terms for writers, scholars, and other professionals. Award-winning art director and design professor Angela Riechers offers a flexible set of principles and best practices for selecting images that work--and using them in the most persuasive way. The result is an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to learn how to work more successfully with images and words. Features more than 200 color illustrations--drawn from a wide range of styles, media, and eras--that demonstrate the principles of visual grammar and how images can support and enhance written content Defines and illustrates the basic elements of images, describes how images function within text regardless of media, and explains how to choose images and integrate them with text Introduces the practical, cultural, conceptual, and scientific factors that influence image use Analyzes images by function and describes ways to employ symbolism, synecdoche, allegory, metaphor, analogy, and iconography

Within every picture is a hidden language that conveys a message, whether it is intended or not. This language is based on the ways people perceive and process visual information. By understanding visual language as the interface between a graphic and a viewer, designers and illustrators can learn to inform with accuracy and power. In a time of unprecedented competition for audience attention and with an increasing demand for complex graphics, Visual Language for Designers explains how to achieve quick and effective communications. New in paperback, this book presents ways to design for the strengths of our innate mental capacities and to compensate for our cognitive limitations. Visual Language for Designers includes: —How to organize graphics for quick perception —How to direct the eyes to essential information —How to use visual shorthand for efficient communication —How to make abstract ideas concrete —How to best express visual complexity —How to charge a graphic with energy and emotion

This primer is designed to teach students the interconnected arts of visual communication. The subject is presented, not as a foreign language, but as a native one that the student "knows" but cannot yet "read." Responding to the need she so clearly perceives, Ms. Dondis, a designer and teacher of broad experience, has provided a beginning text for art and design students and a basic text for all other students; those who do not intend to become artists or designers but who need to acquire the essential skills of understanding visual communication at a time when so much information is being studied and transmitted in non-verbal modes, especially through photography and film. Understanding through seeing only seems to be an obviously intuitive process. Actually, developing the visual sense is something like learning a language, with its own special alphabet, lexicon, and syntax. People find it necessary to be verbally literate whether they are "writers": or not; they should find it equally necessary to be visually literate, "artists" or not. This primer is designed to teach students the interconnected arts of visual communication. The subject is presented, not as a foreign language, but as a native one that the student "knows" but cannot yet "read." The analogy provides a useful teaching method, in part because it is not overworked or too rigorously applied. This method of learning to see and read visual data has already been proved in practice, in settings ranging from Harlem to suburbia. Appropriately, the book makes some of its most telling points through visual means. Numerous illustrated examples are employed to clarify the basic elements of design (teach an alphabet), to show how they are used in simple syntactic combinations ("See Jane run."), and finally, to present the meaningful synthesis of visual information that is a finished work of art (the apprehension of poetry...).

Reading Images provides the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. By looking at the formal elements and structures of design the authors examine the ways in which images communicate meaning.