This project examines the relationship between graphic design and public life in an effort to understand how graphic design functions as a mode of communication, how visual images present interpretive problems for communication scholarship, and how the increasing presence of visual images in public space inform and are informed by a particular understanding of modern publicity. It begins with an account of the field and profession of graphic design in relationship to the visual images produced by graphic designers. With an understanding of graphic design as a communicative practice, the project then moves on to an examination of the interpretive constraints that face the notion of visual communication and develops an alternative reading strategy--a protocol of display--for the objects produced by graphic design. This reading strategy is then applied to a series of contemporary art and advertising projects in an effort to discover the implications of thinking about graphic design as a form of public communication for contemporary mass-audiences. The project develops this protocol of display based on a distinction between visual images and their surfaces of display, and it offers an alternative account of graphic design as a field concerned with surfaces of display as much as if not more than iv visual composition. This turn to surface allows for a dexterous account of visual communication because it considers the very contingent and situated moment when an audience encounters an image, the moment of visual address. In the case of graphic design, those images are invested with a tension between visual and public experiences. The project argues that an appropriate understanding of the two types of experiences can best be critically interrogated at the moment of an audience's experience of a visual surface--as a precondition of an experience of visual content. The project concludes by arguing that graphic design serves as a useful type of public address for modern publics since the tension between the experience of visual content and visual surface allows for a more significant negotiation between notions of private and public identity that become increasingly complicated under the conditions of liberalism and consumer-capitalism.

Last modified

• 08/16/2018

Creator

• Brett Richard Ommen

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N23Q7B

Subject

• Communication Studies

Keyword

• graphic design
• billboards
• public sphere
• visual rhetoric
• rhetoric
• imagination

Date created

• 2007-10-03

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright