For today’s post, I would like to start off with Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism: “The medium is the message.” This means that before we can actually judge or analyse a message, we have to think about the medium as well because medium plays an important role as a message. McLuhan also state that for the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind (p.31). The reason I want to bring this in is that, since when does medium and message not working hand in hand together in order for the information to get through? From newspaper to book, radio to television, different kinds of messages are being conveyed to the people.This week's post is aim to talk about the basic understanding of how visual images are constructed.
At this moment, I feel like a successful novelist.
Has anyone of you ever wonder, why does our passport size photo’s background always blue or white in colour?
I love red colour, so why can’t the background photo be red?
Morris (1938) states that semiotic embrace semantics, syntactic and pragmatics. Semantics is the relationship of signs to what they stand for, syntactics (or syntax) is the formal or structural relations between signs where as pragmatics is the relation of signs to interpreters (6-7).
According to visual rules of semantics, colours have different meanings and sometimes the meanings can differ. For most culture, the colour blue means calm and peace where as white means pure and clean. This may be one of the reasons for blue or white chosen as the universal colour for our passport size photo background. Furthermore, by using syntactic approach, if we use pure bright colours as the background colour, it will break the first rule of colour as strong colors have loud, unbearable effects when they stand unrelieved over large areas adjacent to each other (Tufte, 1990, p.82).
These photos are very unpleasing to the eyes indeed.
How about using a nature background for our passport photo?
This photo then breaks the third rule of colours because in order for the object to stand out, the background has to be inconspicuous (Tufte, 1990).
Extra information:
Look at these watch advertisements. Did you all notice something similar between these advertisements?
Did you notice that most of the times of the watches are the same? The hour hand is pointing to the ten while the minute hand is pointing to two. According to the syntactic Rules of composition, imbalance can caused unpleasant feeling for the viewer (Pettersson, 1989, p. 256). So the hour and minute hands actually balance the weight of the watch so that it will give a feeling of stability.
References:
Griffin, E. (2009). A first look at communication theory. In McLuhan, M., Media Ecology (pp.312-322). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
McLuhan M.(2003). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Gingko, Corte Madare, CA.
Morris, Charles W (1938/1970): Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Chicago: Chicago University Press
Tufte.E.R (1990). Envisioning Information. Cheshire: Graphic Press.
Pettersson, R. (1989) Visuals for Information: Research and Practice. New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications
Images taken from:
My passport size photo
http://cgi.ebay.ca/1979-Benvenuto-Cellini-7-Rolex-Watches-Tiffany-Print-Ad-/5030300495
http://www.europastar.com/magazine/highlights/1000847403-the-new-faces-of-rolex.html
http://www.ioffer.com/si/hamilton%20watch
http://www.watcheshead.com/armani-watches/smart-looking-watch-from-emporio-armani
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