Visual LiteracyA NECESSARY COMPONENT OF TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION

Visual Literacy

Visual Culture Tech Communication and Visual Literacy Visual Social Semantics -- Visual Analysis 3D Instruction Manuals Emotionally charged for the future

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Visual culture is concerned with the visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the customer in an interface with visual technology.

- Nicolas Mirzoeff

Evolution of Visual Culture

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Technical communication is the creation of technical documents, you are writing, designing, and transmitting technical information so that people can understand it easily and use it safely, effectively and efficiently.- Mike Markel

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A variety of terms to represent the visual, including visual rhetoric, visual communication, and visual language.” - Tiffany Craft Portewig

Visual Social Semantics

The description of semiotic resources, what can be said and done with images, and how the things people say and do with images can be interpreted.

Visual Social Semantics Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), “recognizes that image performs

simultaneously on three kinds of meta-semiotic tasks to create meaning.”

Three Meta-Semiotic Tasks

Representational metafunction Interpersonal metafunction

Compositional metafunction

Representational metafunctionLooks at the person, place, or objects in the image.

www.ziphinge.com/installation/

Interpersonal metafunctionCovers the participants’ actions producing and viewing the image.

www.ziphinge.com/installation/

Compositional metafunction

www.ziphinge.com/installation/

How an image creates meaning through the visual syntax of image and layout.

3D User Instructions

+Tech Comm Emotion Visual Literacy=

Final Note: Remember not all technical communication may be as it appears. It requires visual literacy savvy.

Credits

www.ziphinge.com/installation/ academy.3ds.com/lab/animated-3d-assembly-instructions-for-lego

/ Markel, M. (2007). Technical Communciation(8th ed.).

Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martins. Portewig, T. (2004). Making sense of the visual in technical

communication: a visual literacy approach to pedagogy. Journal Of Technical Writing & Communication, 34(1/2), 31-42.