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Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design
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321 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1996
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September 29, 2014
I was reading this book during the week and it said something and I suddenly realised I could test what it said by doing a quiz of my friends on Facebook. This is the question I asked:
You approach the toilets in a public building and the only symbols on the doors to indicate the sex of the users are a square and a circle. Which door should a woman enter?
Probably the square
Probably the circle
Couldn't begin to guess
I’ll leave you to think about that for a while - if you are interested you can put your answer in the comment section.
This is a seriously interesting book. It applies Halliday’s functional linguistics to how we make meaning from images. I’ve been reading – off and on – Halliday’s An Introduction to Functional Grammar over the last couple of months. The problem isn’t so much that it is a hard read. It is that, but not insanely so. The problem is that the book is too big to be read comfortably and so I need to be sitting at a desk to read it. This has made other, more conveniently sized books much more appealing.
For example, one of the things Halliday says is that sentences in English generally come in two parts, what would traditionally have been called the subject of the sentence followed by the predicate. The subject of the sentence is generally ‘known’ and comes first in the sentence (at the left of the sentence) – It is the person or thing we are telling the story about. What is ‘unknown’ is what they have been up to. So, English sentences tend to move from the known to the unknown and from left to right. This book gives lots of examples from art and newspapers where this structure also applies to our reading of images. Often the thing that is given is placed on the left of the drawing and what is problematic is placed on the right. They even go so far as to say that when new, push button phones came out in the early 1990s they tended to have the handset (what had remained the same about phones) on the left hand side and the new fangled buttons and answering machine functions on the right – despite right-handed people then having to juggle the phone into their left hand to use it properly.
A wonderfully interesting example of this is given when they talk about God in works of art in both medieval and renaissance art. In medieval art God is the given and so He often appears on the left-hand side of the image. But on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Adam is on the left and God on the right – this is because by the Renaissance man is the obvious given and God had become problematic and in need of explanation.
If moving from the left to the right is a movement from the known to the unknown and problematic, then up and down in the frame is also highly significant. The bottom of an image is related to the earth, the top the sky: the mundane and the ethereal, the real and the ideal. I understand these classification systems don’t always work, but over the last few days I’ve become fascinated looking at images and objects and it is remarkable how often these schemes have helped me interpret images.
Of course, not all images are meant to be read left to right or even up and down. Some images are centre focused and so what is in the centre of the picture is of maximum importance and things become less important as they move out towards the periphery. They present an image of the Buddha in the centre of a lotus flower and other holy men on the petals around him as an example.
These ‘rules of thumb’ are also shown to apply to flow-charts and newspaper layouts. They show how changing the orientation of image and text changes the meaning of the layout – and this is quite something.
There is also a very interesting discussion on abstraction – particularly distortion within scientific drawing. The example I enjoyed the most concerned the standard textbook drawing of a cube. Generally this involves a perfect square facing the viewer and parallel lines going off to the side so you can see a side and the top. Interestingly, if you could see a perfect square face of a cube that would be all you would be able to see – the other faces, by definition, would remain hidden from view. But scientific drawing isn’t really interested in naturalism – it is about illustrating reality in such a way as to make a problem or experiment transparently clear, not really in duplicating reality. So, scientific drawing is about distorting reality so as to make it, in a way, more real. I’ve drawn cubes like this all of my life and never really thought about them being ‘distorted’. Some images are presented from Newton’s Optics as a case in point – since Newton stands early in the scientific process his drawings are, if anything, far too life like – and so not nearly schematised enough, not abstract enough.
The point the authors make strongly at the start and justify throughout the rest of the book is that we assume images are immediate and transparent and so students don’t really need instruction in learning how to read them. However, I really wish at some stage someone had offered me some instruction in the basics of reading images. A lot of what helps us to make sense of images, like the choices of focus and lighting and perspective, seem obvious when they are explained – but really, it takes the greatest of geniuses to point out the obvious. We can generally do with more people prepared to point out the obvious in the world – even if, like Socrates and Jesus, sometimes we then have to kill them for doing just that.
I’m going to end with the results I sent to my friends who responded to my quiz above about women and toilets:
I’ve been reading a book called ‘Reading Images’ – anyway, it said in passing that two of the fundamental shapes (the circle and the square) are gendered in our culture. They said this is because there are no squares in nature, but our civilisation abounds in them. There are windows and walls and city blocks and television screens. Nature prefers curves and circles. But we also have a preference for considering nature as female – mother nature – and civilisation as being male – man-made. When I read this I thought it was one of those likely sounding ideas that wouldn’t quite work if you put it to the test. So, I put it to the test.
I’ve asked the question here on Facebook and to people elsewhere. The results so far have been:
Don’t Know 6 Circle 20 Square 0
Now, some of you thought this should be completely random – but let’s imagine it actually was. Let’s say the question had been: “I am going to flip a coin, will it land – heads, tails or I don’t know?” In that case surely most people would say – I don’t know. There might be some who would say heads (I’m even prepared to believe more people would say heads than tails) but surely some of those silly enough to choose something other than ‘I don’t know’ would also say tails. Notice that not one, single person said the woman should go through the square signed door.
Prior to doing this I was wondering what I might consider a fair level of statistical significance. So far that hasn’t really been an issue. I suspect the odds of getting 20 people to say women = circle and none to say women = square is 2 to the power of 20 (thanks Choupette) to one against – or about a million : 1.
Now, it might well be that the authors’ reasons for coming up with why we associate circles with women are wrong. Alternative suggestions so far have focused on circles and holes or on the shapes of male and female bodies. I can accept that there is something to all of these or perhaps that they are all rubbish – but the fact seems to remain that our society is much more gendered than we generally notice.
I want to stress how bizarre this is. In the hypothetical hotel toilets I made up I put what might well have seemed like two completely random shapes on the doors – shapes people don’t generally think about as being gendered in any way – and yet nearly 80% of people picked the ‘right’ door for each of the sexes to go through and not a single person went through the ‘wrong’ door. If success was 'no girls in the boys' toilets' then we have 100% success.
Oh, and two people – both female – told me they thought the experiment so obvious it didn’t really even need doing.
Thanks for taking the time to do this - I had no idea it would work out quite the way it did.
Since then I’ve had five more people respond – all have voted for the circle.
You approach the toilets in a public building and the only symbols on the doors to indicate the sex of the users are a square and a circle. Which door should a woman enter?
Probably the square
Probably the circle
Couldn't begin to guess
I’ll leave you to think about that for a while - if you are interested you can put your answer in the comment section.
This is a seriously interesting book. It applies Halliday’s functional linguistics to how we make meaning from images. I’ve been reading – off and on – Halliday’s An Introduction to Functional Grammar over the last couple of months. The problem isn’t so much that it is a hard read. It is that, but not insanely so. The problem is that the book is too big to be read comfortably and so I need to be sitting at a desk to read it. This has made other, more conveniently sized books much more appealing.
For example, one of the things Halliday says is that sentences in English generally come in two parts, what would traditionally have been called the subject of the sentence followed by the predicate. The subject of the sentence is generally ‘known’ and comes first in the sentence (at the left of the sentence) – It is the person or thing we are telling the story about. What is ‘unknown’ is what they have been up to. So, English sentences tend to move from the known to the unknown and from left to right. This book gives lots of examples from art and newspapers where this structure also applies to our reading of images. Often the thing that is given is placed on the left of the drawing and what is problematic is placed on the right. They even go so far as to say that when new, push button phones came out in the early 1990s they tended to have the handset (what had remained the same about phones) on the left hand side and the new fangled buttons and answering machine functions on the right – despite right-handed people then having to juggle the phone into their left hand to use it properly.
A wonderfully interesting example of this is given when they talk about God in works of art in both medieval and renaissance art. In medieval art God is the given and so He often appears on the left-hand side of the image. But on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Adam is on the left and God on the right – this is because by the Renaissance man is the obvious given and God had become problematic and in need of explanation.
If moving from the left to the right is a movement from the known to the unknown and problematic, then up and down in the frame is also highly significant. The bottom of an image is related to the earth, the top the sky: the mundane and the ethereal, the real and the ideal. I understand these classification systems don’t always work, but over the last few days I’ve become fascinated looking at images and objects and it is remarkable how often these schemes have helped me interpret images.
Of course, not all images are meant to be read left to right or even up and down. Some images are centre focused and so what is in the centre of the picture is of maximum importance and things become less important as they move out towards the periphery. They present an image of the Buddha in the centre of a lotus flower and other holy men on the petals around him as an example.
These ‘rules of thumb’ are also shown to apply to flow-charts and newspaper layouts. They show how changing the orientation of image and text changes the meaning of the layout – and this is quite something.
There is also a very interesting discussion on abstraction – particularly distortion within scientific drawing. The example I enjoyed the most concerned the standard textbook drawing of a cube. Generally this involves a perfect square facing the viewer and parallel lines going off to the side so you can see a side and the top. Interestingly, if you could see a perfect square face of a cube that would be all you would be able to see – the other faces, by definition, would remain hidden from view. But scientific drawing isn’t really interested in naturalism – it is about illustrating reality in such a way as to make a problem or experiment transparently clear, not really in duplicating reality. So, scientific drawing is about distorting reality so as to make it, in a way, more real. I’ve drawn cubes like this all of my life and never really thought about them being ‘distorted’. Some images are presented from Newton’s Optics as a case in point – since Newton stands early in the scientific process his drawings are, if anything, far too life like – and so not nearly schematised enough, not abstract enough.
The point the authors make strongly at the start and justify throughout the rest of the book is that we assume images are immediate and transparent and so students don’t really need instruction in learning how to read them. However, I really wish at some stage someone had offered me some instruction in the basics of reading images. A lot of what helps us to make sense of images, like the choices of focus and lighting and perspective, seem obvious when they are explained – but really, it takes the greatest of geniuses to point out the obvious. We can generally do with more people prepared to point out the obvious in the world – even if, like Socrates and Jesus, sometimes we then have to kill them for doing just that.
I’m going to end with the results I sent to my friends who responded to my quiz above about women and toilets:
I’ve been reading a book called ‘Reading Images’ – anyway, it said in passing that two of the fundamental shapes (the circle and the square) are gendered in our culture. They said this is because there are no squares in nature, but our civilisation abounds in them. There are windows and walls and city blocks and television screens. Nature prefers curves and circles. But we also have a preference for considering nature as female – mother nature – and civilisation as being male – man-made. When I read this I thought it was one of those likely sounding ideas that wouldn’t quite work if you put it to the test. So, I put it to the test.
I’ve asked the question here on Facebook and to people elsewhere. The results so far have been:
Don’t Know 6 Circle 20 Square 0
Now, some of you thought this should be completely random – but let’s imagine it actually was. Let’s say the question had been: “I am going to flip a coin, will it land – heads, tails or I don’t know?” In that case surely most people would say – I don’t know. There might be some who would say heads (I’m even prepared to believe more people would say heads than tails) but surely some of those silly enough to choose something other than ‘I don’t know’ would also say tails. Notice that not one, single person said the woman should go through the square signed door.
Prior to doing this I was wondering what I might consider a fair level of statistical significance. So far that hasn’t really been an issue. I suspect the odds of getting 20 people to say women = circle and none to say women = square is 2 to the power of 20 (thanks Choupette) to one against – or about a million : 1.
Now, it might well be that the authors’ reasons for coming up with why we associate circles with women are wrong. Alternative suggestions so far have focused on circles and holes or on the shapes of male and female bodies. I can accept that there is something to all of these or perhaps that they are all rubbish – but the fact seems to remain that our society is much more gendered than we generally notice.
I want to stress how bizarre this is. In the hypothetical hotel toilets I made up I put what might well have seemed like two completely random shapes on the doors – shapes people don’t generally think about as being gendered in any way – and yet nearly 80% of people picked the ‘right’ door for each of the sexes to go through and not a single person went through the ‘wrong’ door. If success was 'no girls in the boys' toilets' then we have 100% success.
Oh, and two people – both female – told me they thought the experiment so obvious it didn’t really even need doing.
Thanks for taking the time to do this - I had no idea it would work out quite the way it did.
Since then I’ve had five more people respond – all have voted for the circle.
April 19, 2015
This book is an attempt (a successful attempt) in theorising the 'reading' of images. Kress and van Leeuwen, drawing upon Semiotic analysis and Literary Theory, provide a set of tools of analysis to explore the 'visual design' of everyday life (images, films, ads...etc). They refer to this framework as Visual Social Semiotics. i.e., how these visual designs and structure create and generate meaning, and, more specifically, how images communicate meaning and how meaning gets into images. From a background in linguistics, they call for a 'grammar' of the visual. A grammar that will help us 'read' those visual structures in a more functional and structured fashion. The framework Kress and van Leeuwen trace down is characterised by three meta-functions that are believed to be generated in any single visual design, be it an image, a movie, an ad...etc. That is each visual structure performs one of these semiotic functions/task (drawing on the work made by Halliday in linguistics):
1-the representational meta-function
2-the interpersonal meta-function
3-the compositional meta-function
So, each visual structure is thought to be analysed on the light of these semiotic tasks or meta-function.
Kress and van Leeuwen propose a theory they refer to as Modality Markers Theory. They argue that the same way language users elaborate on "modal verbs" to determine the 'certainty' of their statements, images, for instance, also communicate this 'certainty' and 'realness' through the use of 'visual cues' or 'modality markers' (these are being for example the framing, the shot, the position of objects, the composition...etc.). These markers help turning, say, the photograph look 'what counts as real'. Images with 'high modality' seem to be more 'real' and 'reliable' than those with a lower modality.
The book is, to my mind, a further elaboration on the basics (the basics of the Semiotic analysis of media texts) Roland Barthes discussed in his essays "The Rhetoric of the Image", "The Photographic Message" (in Image-Text-Music (1977), the collection of his essays), and further in his book Mythologies (1957) and Camera Lucida (1980).
1-the representational meta-function
2-the interpersonal meta-function
3-the compositional meta-function
So, each visual structure is thought to be analysed on the light of these semiotic tasks or meta-function.
Kress and van Leeuwen propose a theory they refer to as Modality Markers Theory. They argue that the same way language users elaborate on "modal verbs" to determine the 'certainty' of their statements, images, for instance, also communicate this 'certainty' and 'realness' through the use of 'visual cues' or 'modality markers' (these are being for example the framing, the shot, the position of objects, the composition...etc.). These markers help turning, say, the photograph look 'what counts as real'. Images with 'high modality' seem to be more 'real' and 'reliable' than those with a lower modality.
The book is, to my mind, a further elaboration on the basics (the basics of the Semiotic analysis of media texts) Roland Barthes discussed in his essays "The Rhetoric of the Image", "The Photographic Message" (in Image-Text-Music (1977), the collection of his essays), and further in his book Mythologies (1957) and Camera Lucida (1980).
October 9, 2011
Must be fully caffeinated when reading this book.
November 27, 2016
Easily readable for an academic publication, and very useful for people writing about multimodality.
April 10, 2013
An okay intermediate-level manual of the semiotics of visuals and visual design. Imperfect, and full of a lot of what most people would call "theory gibberish." The most common punctuation is not a period or question, but quotes. A misuse of quotes, actually, in the attempt create categories. There's a lot to be said about examining images and determining whether they have an argument or whether their arguments are successful. There's value in determining whether visuals have prejudice in favor of dominant classes/castes. What strikes me about Kress and van Leeuwan is that they have useful ideas, but are borderline on clarity. For a student, it's somewhat appropriate. For someone outside academia or without any familiarity in semiotics, it might be puzzling and a snoozefest. Then again, it's a snoozefest for those with a working understanding of semiotics, too.
December 13, 2014
Some good ideas, but the authors write like pompous douches.
August 6, 2020
Este libro no necesita una review. Kress & van Leeuwen son los pioneros en explorar un territorio relativamente nuevo. Mi único problema con el libro es que la organización dificulta la comprensión de los conceptos y cómo se relacionan entre sí. (Fue un alivio saber que a mi supervisora de tesis le pasaba lo mismo!). En fin, un MUST para el arte de leer imágenes.
January 18, 2015
Sejujurnya, buku ini tidak sepenuhnya aku baca. Well, buku non fiksi yang dibaca full itu bisa dihitung dengan jari. Biasa skip sana-sini, asal dapat intinya. Kenapa? Karena buku non-fiksi nggak perlu plot.
Tapi, buku non-fiksi yang akademis seperti ini biasanya penuh sistematika: bacalah pengantarnya terlebih dahulu, atau bacalah pendahuluan terlebih dahulu, atau selamat kebingungan kaau bacanya lompat-lompat.
Entah karena topik tugas akhirku tidak jauh dari ini atau memang penulisnya pintar dalam menyampaikan, buku (e-book) ini enak dibaca. Apalagi kalau sudah familiar dengan istilah-istilah dalam file visual-digital, seperti pixel, resolusi, saturasi, dan lain sebagainya.
Pada intinya, buku ini menjelaskan cara-cara membaca dan memaknai gambar sesuai dengan nilai-nilai sosial yang berlaku. Setiap karya, baik teks berupa tulisan maupun gambar, tentu dibuat untuk memenuhi maksud/tujuan tertentu. Kalau teks berupa tulisan dapat dimaknai dari sisi linguistiknya (atau apanyalah, kamus? metafora? dll?), gambar bisa dimaknai dari berbagai elemen. Salah satu elemen yang menurutku menarik adalah modality ---apa terjemahnya? modalitas?
Intinya, tentang seberapa otentik/reliable-nya sebuah gambar. Apakah gambar itu dapat dipercaya? Apakah gambar itu dapat menyampaikan pesan yang ingin dikemukakan oleh pembuatnya?
Bagaimana cara menilai itu? Lihat unsur-unsur pembangunnya: seberapa tinggi brightness-nya? seberapa banyak saturasi warna-nya? dan lain sebagainya. Misal: gambar yang tampak kabur dengan warna yang agak pudar biasanya menunjukkan pesan 'fantasi/khayalan seseorang', lalu gambar yang hitam-putih biasanya menunjukkan adegan di lini waktu yang lain (kejadian di masa lalu, dan lain sebagainya).
Menarik, bukan?
P.S. sebenarnya yang paling menarik dari buku ini adalah.. mengapa dia bisa membuatku menganggap sebuah buku referensi sepertinya sebagai suatu bacaan yang menarik? ._.
oh, dan coba hitung berapa jumlah tanda tanya yang ada di review ini :p
Tapi, buku non-fiksi yang akademis seperti ini biasanya penuh sistematika: bacalah pengantarnya terlebih dahulu, atau bacalah pendahuluan terlebih dahulu, atau selamat kebingungan kaau bacanya lompat-lompat.
Entah karena topik tugas akhirku tidak jauh dari ini atau memang penulisnya pintar dalam menyampaikan, buku (e-book) ini enak dibaca. Apalagi kalau sudah familiar dengan istilah-istilah dalam file visual-digital, seperti pixel, resolusi, saturasi, dan lain sebagainya.
Pada intinya, buku ini menjelaskan cara-cara membaca dan memaknai gambar sesuai dengan nilai-nilai sosial yang berlaku. Setiap karya, baik teks berupa tulisan maupun gambar, tentu dibuat untuk memenuhi maksud/tujuan tertentu. Kalau teks berupa tulisan dapat dimaknai dari sisi linguistiknya (atau apanyalah, kamus? metafora? dll?), gambar bisa dimaknai dari berbagai elemen. Salah satu elemen yang menurutku menarik adalah modality ---apa terjemahnya? modalitas?
Intinya, tentang seberapa otentik/reliable-nya sebuah gambar. Apakah gambar itu dapat dipercaya? Apakah gambar itu dapat menyampaikan pesan yang ingin dikemukakan oleh pembuatnya?
Bagaimana cara menilai itu? Lihat unsur-unsur pembangunnya: seberapa tinggi brightness-nya? seberapa banyak saturasi warna-nya? dan lain sebagainya. Misal: gambar yang tampak kabur dengan warna yang agak pudar biasanya menunjukkan pesan 'fantasi/khayalan seseorang', lalu gambar yang hitam-putih biasanya menunjukkan adegan di lini waktu yang lain (kejadian di masa lalu, dan lain sebagainya).
Menarik, bukan?
P.S. sebenarnya yang paling menarik dari buku ini adalah.. mengapa dia bisa membuatku menganggap sebuah buku referensi sepertinya sebagai suatu bacaan yang menarik? ._.
oh, dan coba hitung berapa jumlah tanda tanya yang ada di review ini :p
February 12, 2019
So, if you want to tackle something really dense that will make you think, but also send you into information overload, take on this book! As someone who teaches writing and incorporates arts-based assignments, I knew reading this was pretty much required. I do not typically analyze the art my students produce itself (I lean more towards the expressive arts), but reading this will help enhance your experiences of even viewing art, thinking about the relationship with the viewer, artists' choices such as if a subject faces the viewer or does not, and considering how much the artist is really willing to reveal.
I also appreciated the points the authors make about how solitary both reading and writing often are, as well as how complex written word really is. They seem to understand how essential the visual can be in communication; however, they seem to lack practical ways for readers to include more of it in curriculum.
I do not think the authors seem very interested/passionate in their subject and definitely do not write in an engaging way. Moreover, their haphazard use of punctuation was distracting. Though the Oxford comma is viewed optional by some (many of who do not obtain high-level degrees), I feel like it's pretty standard for academic texts. If you think I'm being picky, they also lack necessary commas with introductory phrases (in areas); therefore, I appreciate learning some new concepts, but did not enjoy it.
I also appreciated the points the authors make about how solitary both reading and writing often are, as well as how complex written word really is. They seem to understand how essential the visual can be in communication; however, they seem to lack practical ways for readers to include more of it in curriculum.
I do not think the authors seem very interested/passionate in their subject and definitely do not write in an engaging way. Moreover, their haphazard use of punctuation was distracting. Though the Oxford comma is viewed optional by some (many of who do not obtain high-level degrees), I feel like it's pretty standard for academic texts. If you think I'm being picky, they also lack necessary commas with introductory phrases (in areas); therefore, I appreciate learning some new concepts, but did not enjoy it.
January 7, 2013
Discusses a wide range of issues over a broad spread of content (from modern art to children's books). Criticism of the book for being overly linguistic seems harsh, as the authors qualify the use of linguistic methods repeatedly where relevant and do not attempt an unthinking transfer of methods from one semiotic mode to another.
The frameworks constructed in the relevant chapters provide an effective summary/hierarchy of the identified features. However. there appears to be little attempt to link together the different frameworks/'realizations' into a cohesive, single, system.
The frameworks constructed in the relevant chapters provide an effective summary/hierarchy of the identified features. However. there appears to be little attempt to link together the different frameworks/'realizations' into a cohesive, single, system.
January 29, 2015
“Social semiotic theory of representation”; extensive use of linguistic metaphors (as one might expect).
The presentation gets hung up on 1:1 conversation/discourse patterns that probably won’t have a lot to say to videos. Does, however, include sections on vocabulary and ways to present information visually. Useful perhaps for undergrads in non-internet-based media.
The presentation gets hung up on 1:1 conversation/discourse patterns that probably won’t have a lot to say to videos. Does, however, include sections on vocabulary and ways to present information visually. Useful perhaps for undergrads in non-internet-based media.
February 24, 2019
Basics of making sense of visual information. For experienced researchers, even with limited expertise in visual analysis, this book is rather a trivial reminder, though I would actually advise it for students in social sciences.
February 11, 2023
Skimmed my way through this book. It was still a slog.
Don't be tempted by the 5-star reviews.
Only read if you're deep down the semiotics rabbit hole.
Otherwise, pick up any other book on understanding images like Interaction of Color or Understanding Comics.
Don't be tempted by the 5-star reviews.
Only read if you're deep down the semiotics rabbit hole.
Otherwise, pick up any other book on understanding images like Interaction of Color or Understanding Comics.
February 16, 2022
The best effort to date to systematically understand how images 'mean'. Read my full review of the most recent edition (2020) in Visual Communication https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full...
March 5, 2025
2006 version
May 3, 2014
The authors have developed a theory for creating and "reading" images based on semiotics. Throughout the book, they tweak and expand semiotic terms and grammar terms (narrative representation, interaction, conceptual representation, etc) to explain how images work. They also delve briefly into the roles of color, material (paint, ink, pixels, etc), motion (movies), and three-dimensions (sculpture, architecture) towards the end.
I read a section of this book for my Master's project and then decided to read the rest because the subject intrigued me. It's not a light read, but I read 80% of it as though it was one since I was just reading it for the occasionally useful glimpses into how I create and use images in my career.
Overall, the theory presented here is interesting and makes sense as an extension of the semiotics and grammar of language. Usually, I found the breakdown of meaning and concepts in specific image examples intriguing and helpful, but occasionally it seemed to overstep - particulary in the last section that analyzes a child's painting called Colourful Thoughts.
I also couldn't help but wonder how much of their theory is really subconscious within us all as we create images - particularly because so many examples used in the text are children's drawings. Things like the meaning of left, right, and center are things we all know how to use, but other aspects of the theory presented here seem easy to read but difficult or unlikely to purposefully create in an image.
I appreciated the variety of examples used, but wished that the book had more color images. There are many instances where the authors discuss aspects of an image that cannot be seen in the grainy black-and-white copies included. Quite a few of the images are also pretty old, despite the book's being updated in 2006 - it barely touches on the immense changes that have happened since the original writing in 1996.
Themes: textbook, visual, communication, semiotics
I read a section of this book for my Master's project and then decided to read the rest because the subject intrigued me. It's not a light read, but I read 80% of it as though it was one since I was just reading it for the occasionally useful glimpses into how I create and use images in my career.
Overall, the theory presented here is interesting and makes sense as an extension of the semiotics and grammar of language. Usually, I found the breakdown of meaning and concepts in specific image examples intriguing and helpful, but occasionally it seemed to overstep - particulary in the last section that analyzes a child's painting called Colourful Thoughts.
I also couldn't help but wonder how much of their theory is really subconscious within us all as we create images - particularly because so many examples used in the text are children's drawings. Things like the meaning of left, right, and center are things we all know how to use, but other aspects of the theory presented here seem easy to read but difficult or unlikely to purposefully create in an image.
I appreciated the variety of examples used, but wished that the book had more color images. There are many instances where the authors discuss aspects of an image that cannot be seen in the grainy black-and-white copies included. Quite a few of the images are also pretty old, despite the book's being updated in 2006 - it barely touches on the immense changes that have happened since the original writing in 1996.
Themes: textbook, visual, communication, semiotics
June 18, 2020
Gunther Kress y Theo van Leeuwen, ambos discípulos del renombrado M.A.K. Halliday, emprenden en este libro un recorrido teórico que cambiará la forma en la que se piensan, interpretan y analizan los discursos. Retomando los postulados de la semiótica social se proponen diferenciar y entender cómo se producen significados en aquellos textos donde los principales elementos semióticos no son los verbales. Esta búsqueda por comprender "la gramática del diseño visual" los conducirá a postular la teoría más revolucionaria de los últimos años en el campo del análisis del discurso: la multimodalidad.
Sin dudas una obra fundamental para los interesados en los estudios del discurso, una obra brillante, llena de preguntas que nos interpelan y desarman los conocimientos que creíamos aprendidos acerca de la producción y la interpretación de los textos. Una obra que rompe con la lógica de la retórica visual, hegemónica en las semiótica tradicional y que, al mismo tiempo, deja en evidencia las dificultades de la lingüística para dar cuenta de la complejidad de los textos en esta época.
Al leer los últimos párrafos de este libro siento que no volveré a leer nada igual en mucho, mucho tiempo...
Sin dudas una obra fundamental para los interesados en los estudios del discurso, una obra brillante, llena de preguntas que nos interpelan y desarman los conocimientos que creíamos aprendidos acerca de la producción y la interpretación de los textos. Una obra que rompe con la lógica de la retórica visual, hegemónica en las semiótica tradicional y que, al mismo tiempo, deja en evidencia las dificultades de la lingüística para dar cuenta de la complejidad de los textos en esta época.
Al leer los últimos párrafos de este libro siento que no volveré a leer nada igual en mucho, mucho tiempo...
July 6, 2013
These authors make Barthes and Debord seem like summer reading. There are some great insights and interesting associations, but I'm not entirely sure the reward outweighs the risk. I wouldn't say reading this book was like pulling teeth...more like brushing teeth with steel wool. Unless you're a diehard about these topics, I'd stay away.
July 20, 2016
I do see images in a different way now that I have read this book. I learnt how to 'read' them not from from the cultural and social perspective. I think studying the model proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen should be included into the course of communication, especially dealing with the visual communication of whatever kind.
June 23, 2021
Great book. It is a pioneer work, which offers great notions and a solid method on the reading of multimodal texts and images. A must read for anyone working in the semiotics field. I can't give it a full 5 stars rating just because I didn't found here the totality of what I was looking for: a framework to study humor multimodal texts. Guess I'll have to keep looking 🤷♂️
April 21, 2016
Includes some very interesting points, but otherwise not such a clear book. On the other hand I like the way it has been written.
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May 20, 2016given away May '16
May 26, 2017
Yes, I really should have read this book cover to cover years ago. Better late than never, right?
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April 29, 2016Funny how a textbook has the power to suck all the fun out of something.
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