Week Three - Visual Design and The Art of Persuasion

Today we learnt about visual design and how an object's connotation can affect how it’s viewed. The idea of objects having alternative meanings comes from Roland Barthes theories surrounding connotation and denotation, with denotation reflecting the literal meaning and its connotations discussing what it implicitly implies, which is affected by the viewer's cultural knowledge. These ideas can be reflected in many adverts as often marketers will imbed a deeper meaning in order to ensure a successful campaign. Deeper meaning can often be reflected in four main elements, colour, type, semiotics (the study of signs) and ‘what is persuasion’. This is interesting as it's a concept you can apply to every advert you see, something which interests me personally as discovering the subliminal meanings of texts is something I always want to uncover and learn more about.

We then continued and began to learn about Gestalt Theory. This is a concept containing five laws which cover the typical techniques used in advertising. 

Law 1 : Similarity

The idea that a break in repeated similarity grabs the audience's attention.

Law 2 : Proximity

When many smaller, incoherent items are placed in a proximity together that leads to a larger coherent image.

Law 3 : Continuity

A technique often used by large franchises to express the consistent quality of their brand.

Law 4 : Closure

Where a logo isn't technically ‘complete’ but your brain fills in the blank spaces to make it complete. 

Law 5 : Figure and Ground

When the iconography is polysemic/ when an image can be seen multiple ways both connect to the brand.

After learning these we were tasked to draw on our new knowledge of semiotics and Gestalt Theory and create a prototype of a poster for a brand. As I have never been involved with graphic design before I was a little nervous to make a good poster but found the software- Canva - quite simple to navigate. I chose to make a poster for Apple Music, drawing on the idea that despite it being a fairly new platform it held songs that were incredibly nostalgic for many. I based my idea around novelty records which often are produced in different shapes that reflect something symbolic for the artist. I then imported the apple logo and transformed it into a record and made a turntable around it. I found this really enjoyable as it allowed me to try new techniques for creating a media text in a more visual way than I ever had before and because of this I'm currently planning on continuing this for my extended task.