The leading is leading…you
Prompt 2:
Drawing on at least two of the readings, explain what is rhetorical about the visual turn.
Since I’m a design geek. I was particularly interested in the Kinross and Lupton articles. Since type is a building block of any text, I think that it often gets overlooked, just like the foundation of a house. But type does speak and it does affect the narrative of a story.
In the Kinross article, the idea that a specific type of text could seem more authoritative is interesting. The Bauhaus idea of simplicity when applied to text is to question why there are lower and upper case letters, In their words, “why two alphabets for one word?” (Kinross 138)
The fact that a government (the Nazi’s) would change the typeface it normally uses (blackletter) because it is associated a specific group (Jews), is proof of how much type and design can alter the message they carry. They can even lend “authority borrowed from classical Rome.” (Kinross 139)
In another article, Lupton discusses how the construction of the type used in a text can affect how the reader or user interacts with it. Good typography doesn’t only help general readability; it can help an author convey the intended message. For instance, differing line line spacing “As the line spacing becomes more extreme, the block oftext begins to read as separate lines rather than a shade of gray.” (Lufton 83)
-M. Markham
