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

There's an interesting story in today's New York Times regarding the authentication of some pseudo-Pollock paintings. After viewing the attached images of Pollock paintings, take a look at the painting they show. What's your first impression?

Harvard Analysis Casts Doubt on Works Said to Be Pollocks

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.

From Purdue University News Service:

A University of Illinois graphic design professor who also instructs government officials on how to improve their public information materials will speak at Purdue on Jan. 26. Marcia Lausen will present findings from her forthcoming book "Design for Democracy: Election Design" at 5 p.m. in Krannert Building, Room G016. The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Patti and Rusty Rueff Department of Visual and Performing Arts. Lausen uses the confusing design of the "butterfly" ballot used in Florida in the November 2000 election as a demonstration of how poor design choices can adversely affect the function of a democracy.

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.

We say this all the time. What do we mean by "Do you see what I mean?"? How might that be different from "Do you know what I mean?" What exactly would we be seeing. How or why does the imagination play a role in "meaning?"?