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Visual Vestiges explains how information design evolved over the centuries to make practical information clear, credible, and emotionally engaging.
In Visual Vestiges Charles Kostelnick analyzes the role of the past in understanding, studying, deploying, and teaching visual language in business, technical, and professional communication. He explores how information designs—text, pictures, icons, charts, and graphs—evolved to develop their rhetorical power and the many ways in which their vestigial forms permeate contemporary design. To explain these temporal dynamics, he examines the forces that underpin them: cultural shifts in aesthetics, taste, and values; social changes that redefine how we relate to one another rhetorically; and innovations in technology that transform the tools and channels we use to visualize and interpret information. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, art history, and historical and contemporary examples, Kostelnick explores the rhetorical role of time in bridging past and present design forms—by constantly regenerating them through visual conventions, by heightening pathos appeals through sentiment and nostalgia, and by bolstering ethos, amplifying epideictic displays, and narrating stories with text, pictures, and charts.
"Visual Vestiges provides practical illustrations of visual rhetoric's temporal aspects and discussion of how the subject has changed historically. It also offers productive teaching suggestions to guide faculty and their students in the study of visual rhetoric's history and application." — Jeremy Tirrell, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
"Visual Vestiges provides a unique angle into the study of visual design by proposing that history and rhetorical strategies are intertwined factors that affect existing design conventions. The author is a respected scholar in visual rhetoric and document design. Their work deeply engages major theories and key literature to establish an argument for a focus on time (or temporal factors) as an active agent that creates, shapes, stabilizes, destabilizes, and changes design practices. The interplay with classical rhetoric is profound." — Jason Tham, Texas Tech University
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Timely Design: Chronos, Kairos, and the Resilience of Visual Language
2. Epideictic Design: The Visual Rhetorics of Praise and Blame
3. The Pathos of Memory: Sentiment, Nostalgia, and Rhetro Design
4. Visual Storytelling: Temporal Elasticity and the Interplay between Micro- and Macro-Narratives
5. The Myriad and Mutable Faces of Ethos: Designing Trust with Text and Image
6. Making Visual History: Applications for Teaching, Learning, and Discovery
Afterward: Whither Time, Visual Language, and Practical Communication?
Works Cited
Index