English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

This image was posted to CNN on October 11, 2001. I remember saving it back then because it was funny (duh) but also because it was revealing that you had these two disparate cultures at war, and here was this slippage of the one into the other. What does the dialectic of Bert and Bin Laden suggest as an image? It makes Bin Laden look like an idiot (as friendly and nice as Bert is). What's funny i

A social experiment. By Mark Pepper, PI.

Here's a humorous but instructive video showing the virtues and limitations of simple elegance as a design principle. It's a Google video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298

That's a snapshot above of the first pane of (hypothetical) MS redesign of the iPod packaging, which is quite cool. The video makes me wonder, too, about how graphic design for product packaging is tied to distribution channels.

I shared this blog with a friend and he shared this image with me (along witha reccomendation that we read Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information). I think it's breathtaking. And my ability to have an emotional response to it has caused this class to get a great deal more personal. It's only beautiful because it's wrong and complex and so completely self-assured.

The Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte (1898–1967) is well known for pointing out the unusual nature of visual perception and the sometimes illogical presumptions we make about the visual world. One of his most famous works is The Treachery of Images, also commonly known as C‘eci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe).

In this painting, Magritte makes a verbal assertion (This is not a pipe) right beneath a visual representation of a pipe. Then he titles the painting The Treachery of Images.