An e|mediated rhetoric of visuality designing onscreen typo|graphicacy Alan Robertson Unitec Institute of Technology Auckland New Zealand joetal@kiwilink.co.nz 70 Selbourne Street Grey Lynn Auckland New Zealand 09 . 378 4783 (phone) 09 . 378 4771 (fax) Event 1: e|mediated typo|graphicacy 'Funny Signs' was an Acrobat 'visual lecture' for graphic design students, comprising firstly, a 'paper' on semiotic [de]sign-as-ideology, written and designed as screen-statements of 7-30 words (with occasional hidden rollovers), in large white text on a black background (36 point size on the original Quark XPress). The second part was a 'slideshow' of about 80 of my photographs of signage and graffiti, arranged into categories of 'funniness', such as '+-' (by-hand deletions|additions to original signage), and 'juxtapositions' (odd, amusing 'found' signage). The event was an entirely visual, non-performance in silence (soundtrackless, notwithstanding the e|mediated context). It was read, in absorbed silence, by a participating audience: first, 'word-screens', reading in effect as imagery; then photographic imagery, representing the words of signage. It was the typographic design which at once enabled, yet also challenged the audience to focus attentively on each screen. It is this visual nexus of typo|graphic design-as-image-as-screen|information design which preoccupies me. Event 2: from visuality back to literacy After the 'lecture' I attempted to put the 'visual' paper' back onto paper as a 'proper' paper. Since published in TypoGraphic 56 (Journal of the International Society of Typographic Designers) as 'Typography: the signs of ideas', the argument which had seemed convincing in presentation, didn't read well as literate, linear text.The process of deconstructive typo|graphic designing by which a text is edited-by-design into concise, sequential screen-views did not translate back directly into discursive literacy, even though it had begun there originally. The compact, juxtapositional purposiveness of typo|graphicacy and the almost televisual disjunctiveness of its sequential continuity, which had seemed in presentation to sustain meaning-making and seamless memorability for viewer interaction with the rhythms of argument, were too short, too concise on paper. Furthermore, I had two papers, not one. The second part, about responsibilities of the intellectual professional, which had 'worked' in the 'visual lecture', didn't follow on paper. In its published iteration the paper sketches the hegemonic privileging of reason with written|typographic discourse, from Plato to Kant and Peirce, pointing to the parallel presence of an 'other', peripheral humanistic tradition: a recasting of the Romantic|Enlightenment paradigm-shift (Tarnas 10) within a design context (Wilson). It suggests that e|media may signal a "paradigmatic shift from the stasis of typographic textuality to a 'winged' (Mitchell) remediation", of 'imagic' typo|graphicality and argues that graphic design exemplifies the five arts of rhetoric so deplored by Plato. It concludes with the somewhat breathless hope that e|mediation might instantiate an on-line 'globalocality' of public space and dialogic public language (Arendt, Bauman) to counter the dominating dialectics of technocratic corporatism. Finally it reiterates Lanham's suggestion that e|media has facilitated a kind of secondary visual orality of email (and now txt mssgng) in which dialogue returns to the centre of communication. What that paper does not do, is to query the intrinsic rhetoricality of typo|graphic design through application of rhetoric itself as an 'interpretive instrument' (Gaonkar 50) to mediate a prevailing culture of overwhelming rhetorical visuality in which graphic design is uncritically accepted as a powerfully hegemonic medium of 'communication'. Nor does it address the darker implications of a globalised network of 'broadcaught' (Negroponte) media, in which, as Virilio has pithily put it, "interactivity is is to real space what radioactivity is to the atmosphere". Event 3: from literacy to a rhetoric of typo|graphic visuality In presenting this paper I will attempt to demonstrate the rhetorical efficacy of typo|graphic visuality as a public discourse-by-presentation. What you are reading now is visibly, typographically literate, but not typo|graphically visual. The typography of discursive codex-text (Lanham) must be seen to be read, but it does not exemplify the graphicacy of what we are familiar with as 'graphic design' in consumerist society. I will not argue that grasping 'graphics' is as different from reading writing, as 'reading' books is different from 'viewing' television (a familiar argument: see Paglia|Postman), but rather, reiterate that the rhetoricality implicit in that difference can be particularly significant in e|mediation. The online screen is a uniquely responsive (interactive?) visual mediation of otherness, yet one which has evolved within a culture attuned to televisuality (e|media and television share the same screen-format as I discuss below). On television typographic textuality disappears. As Bolter puts it "the text is absorbed into the video image" . But the e|medium puts graphic design back on screen, this time with an expanded hermeneutic remit for designing an explicitly rhetorical typo|graphic visuality. Expressly, as an ideological medium of persuasion in corporatist society, graphic design is complicit in the consumerism of over-expansionist productivism. Yet paradoxically graphic design visually exemplifies the five arts of the rhetorical padaeia by which the participatory dialogue of the democratic public sphere was performed. Wit is derived from the invention of unexpected and original conceptual|visual juxtapositions. Argument may well be sustained through 'copywritten' textuality, but moreso through the overall coherence of the visual composition, the design of the three constitutive elements: text, display text, and imagery. It is this 'imagic' coherence of visuality which constitutes the true rhetorical heart of the 'performance'. (I have coined 'imagic' to describe the peculiar union of image-as-imagery, with 'image' as 'perceived public reputation', which is central to the rhetoricality of visual 'communication'.) Styling, in the typo|graphic fashion or 'look' of the moment, can be so significant a concern as to either dominate user-perception as the 'true' message (bad 'design'), or to be exploited by poor designers as a substitute for invention and argument (even worse 'design'). And finally the artefact is delivered through a highly finished technical grammar and technology of reproduction. Visual constraints of the e|medium Print and 'onscreen' discursive visualities are different 'conduits' through which the visible abstraction of language may be 'delivered' (Reddy 284) as designed visual 'communication'. Print and onscreen e|mediation are privately accessed while presentations (whether e|mediated or not) are publicly (group)read, and often employ conventions such as bullet-point phrases which are rarely intended for contiguous reading, like codex-text, or to be comprehensively coherent as standalone documents.Yet a presentation is onscreen e|mediation writ large, requiring only the addition of way-finding conventions for direct user-access and control.But in designing appropriately for e|mediated graphicacy , there are other visual considerations too. The e|medium has inherited the landscape-format used universally in traditional image-centred media (cameras, television, cinema). Thus 'landscape' is associated with imagery. Even static, juxtapositional typo|graphic design seems to make more visual sense as 'landscape'. The availability of unlimited free colour reinforces this bias towards imagery (just like television) provoking implicitly 'imagic' expectations in the screen-viewer. For, like print periodicals, screens are both 'viewed' and 'read'. But not only are screens wide they are small in size relative to their resolution. A typical 17" screen is A4 on its side, yet its equivalent legible resolution is extremely coarse by comparison with paper.Screen-wide, single-columns of small, print-size html text, then, will be even more unreadable than on paper. Because visual 'real estate' is limited onscreen, instincts are to pack every visible pixel with as much 'information' as possible, thereby ignoring the dual medium-specific virtues of either unlimited virtual screen-size, and|or virtually-unlimited screen availability. Worse it denies any need for design-sense. As Edward Tufte has noted, the problem in dealing with information overload is not its complexity, but rather the quality of its designed organisation. As such, 'authoring' e|media is as much about designing as writing, and interrogates conventional perceptions of what either writing or typo|graphic designing entails. Practising typo|graphicacy My 'writing|designing-as-I-go' process of translating linear text into compact 'screen-bites' necessarily requires a literate editorial capability informed by both visual and typo|graphic designing sensibilities. For the writer, inventing a rigorous, seemingly rational, 'well-arranged' argument will constitute the major task of writing, while 'style' and 'delivery', will be construed as secondary. This is consistent with the Ramist inheritance (Ong, Lanham) in which 'neutrality', 'authority' and 'rationality' became elided with typographic literacy. Because it was self-contained, self-referential and abstract, typographic textuality aspired to an 'objectivity' which eschewed any taint of the 'subjectively' rhetorical. Not only did print beget the myth of the 'original' author (Poster), but also the myths that neither 'originality' nor 'neutrality' nor 'objectivity' were in themselves intrinsically rhetorical conceits. But is not writing itself a design-mediated act? And if rhetoric is the design art at the centre of writing then a designing consciousness must drive all communication. The arts of rhetoric exemplify the inventive ambiguity of human art-making in which originality and the rule-following of practical craftship are seamlessly integrated. And similarly, as the seams between intention and artefact in rhetoric seem particularly transparent (Kaufer) so are they in typo|graphic designing: after all, people have been reading type for five hundred years. Consumerist graphic design is literally and functionally rhetorical, yet its true rhetoricality is implicit as visuality. As an ubiquitous and overtly persuasive form of cultural production, its hegemonic power operates through the paradoxical invisibility of its visuality. Graphic design is so critically unquestioned and so popularly accepted not just as normal as print, but as the defining 'image' of what print means as a 'communication' medium, that it is itself the message; and the message is the rhetorical visuality of the imagic. Animating typo|graphicacy The 'dynamic rhetoric' (Bonsiepe 75) of animation introduces more than an additional disciplinary dimension. Animated typographic 'figures of speech' (Bonsiepe 72) facilitate a particularly explicit visual rhetoricality. For example, in a very short animation 'What is 'creativity' in graphic design?' (in my visual lecture 'The End of Graphic Design') animated typography deconstructs and re-presents internally coherent textual complexity as subtle variations on the same key concepts. E|mediated animation also enables text to oscillate as dense and static linearity, typo|graphics, and a time-base, imagic fusion of form and content; simultaneously subject to both televisual disjunctivity and the associative discontinuity of user-controlled hypertextual non-linearity. Designing text to be both graphic|discursive, and static|dynamic opens structural gaps by means of content-derived visual juxtapositions which liberate meaning, clarify associated concepts, reveal otherwise inchoate links, and designate visual hierarchies of emphasis. As a simultaneous instantiation of meaningful formality, by design, typo|graphicacy can mediate the paradoxical 'fissure' at the heart of rhetoric: that "division of the logos into form and content" (Hariman 227). It can emancipate a hermeneutic understanding of the analytical processes and constraints to which it is itself subject, thereby transcending the sleight of hand by which 'commercial' graphic design conceals its complicity in the hegemonic dissemination of top-down consumerist message-making.But only if it is explicitly designed for this purpose. And it can expose the 'designing' consciousness behind all literacy, the implicit rhetoricality of all communication. Then it serves a hermeneutic of ethical communications, a kind of 'information design' which supports audience understanding, reasoning and reflection, outside the hegemony of a mechanistic media construct which excludes "context, history, expectations, goals, values,priorities, feelings, preferences and differences of intelligence" (Frascara). 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