A GRAMMAR OF DESIGN
The problems with CCS approaches are not located in the process of semiotic analysis itself, and therefore such analysis should not be jettisoned completely. Semiotic analysis is useful but should also be linked more closely with the visual design components of advertisements. For example, take the ad from the latest entry in the popular Hitman video game series. The ad features a heavily made-up woman lying awkwardly on a bed of crumbled satin sheets. She is partially
dressed, bra clearly exposed, and blood is flowing from a gunshot wound placed directly into her forehead. The text reads “Beautifully Executed.” There’s clearly enough going on here to satisfy anyone with a culture studies outlook– without even needing to touch on the specifics of design or layout. The image of victimized, dead, or dismembered women is practically a trope in commercial advertising and fashion– one tackled by practically any feminist take on the media. The fact that such care is taken to sexualize the woman in death (asking the viewer to even find her mortal wound beautiful) is certainly another disturbing aspect of the image. Showcasing her on a bed adds another semiotic layer which equates sex with violence and brutal punishment with female sexuality. I think it’s safe to assume that even more cultural codes could easily be gleaned from this highly charged image.
However, for this ad to be effective in illuminating visual rhetoric, the design decisions should somehow reenforce or expand this semiotic reading. Through either purposeful framing or cropping, care has been taken to make sure the woman’s entire body is on display. Although she is clearly on a bed, the entirety of it (or even the rest of the room) has been hidden from view. In the most basic sense, these factors ensure that the woman will become the focus of the picture. However; the two points most likely focused on first (the top-left or the absolute center) will not reveal her murdered condition. This tight framing, combined with the off-center placement of her face, invites the eye to first travel across the woman’s body. The vectors of attention created by the angles of her legs and right arm even attempt to force our eyes back towards the top left of the frame and away from the revelation we will find on her face. This attempt on the creator’s part to move our eye across the body puts the viewer in a similar situation as the hitman he or she will become if they buy the game. Design decisions force our eyes to size up the prey, view the scene through the eyes of the hitman, and become momentarily distracted from what WE have done.
Obviously, from the critique perspective of most cultural studies pedagogies, a student noticing these aspects would be encouraged to damn the notion of having a viewer identify with the hitman at the expense of the victimized female. However, from the perspective of design, the interplay of images and text allows the viewer to experience an aspect of the product even before they potentially purchase it. This may be composition skill in the service of a message many humanities academics find unsavory (BUY THIS PRODUCT!), and the scholarly perspective may find it difficult to ignore the possible lack of responsible ethics and diversified representations in much of commercial media. But I’m not asking those factors to be ignored, and I’m not suggesting we prepare our students for careers in advertising. I am suggesting that ads perform this image/text communication better (in the service of their specific goals) then most other examples we could show our students. If we teach them how to first analyze visual rhetoric we will be equipping them with tools to produce responses to the cultural messages they find in the ads– conditions that the standard academic paper simply don’t meet.
To eventually produce their own visual compositions, students will need a meaningful grammar of the visual as I attempted to use in the above example. Many of us (accustomed to teaching the grammar of thesis statements, transitions, citation method, punctuation, etc.) may not instantly feel comfortable doing so. Instructor and student may bemoan the feeling that composition class has turned into a graphic design class (this from students who are even enjoying themselves in the process!). To counter these fears (and simultaneously ground the proceedings in a composition context), visual elements should be highlighted for the way they move beyond mere aesthetics. In other words, the visual aspects of an advertisement should be explained as rhetorical decisions that add complexity of meaning and help shape the ad’s message.
To aid in the process, a number of recent textbooks have incorporated visual rhetoric, including: AnnWysocki’s and Dennis Lynch’s Compose Design Advocate and Robert Atwan’s Convergences: Method Message Medium. Since analyzing and composing visual arguments will be new to many of our students, heightened sensitivity should be given to the choice of a course text. Many of the concepts and terms may need an official repository that only text books composed with visual rhetoric in mind may offer. For example, Wysocki’s and Lynch’s book is divided into chapters that provide a grammar of the visual based on analyzing: photographs, posters, comics, instruction manuals, and more. The book additionally provides a wealth of examples that show
how to analyze for; vectors of attention, cropping, framing, contrast, font choice, alignment, repetition, color, proximity, and more. Often, the need to showcase comic strips or movie posters in such a text does come at the expense of more traditional essays. Instructors accustomed to assigning long chunks of text may find themselves going into textual withdrawals (they can, of course, supplement the course text with outside fixes). However, Compose Design Advocate, and texts like it, do provide online essays and magazine pieces. The pieces are presented as they appeared in their original sources, further reinforcing that page layout, accompanying pictures, and web frames do contribute to the meaning of a text. Ultimately, the exact terminology one chooses to teach may be based in part on the limitations of the chosen text, and in part on what kinds of visual analysis an instructor wants students to focus on. For example, an instructor most interested in web analysis would do well to introduce the concepts of: frames, panels, navigation, functionality, and hypertext.
