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Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators. Charles Kostelnick and David D. Roberts. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.
Reviewed by Deborah C. Andrews
University of Delaware
Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators is an excellent text on information design, on what the authors, Charles Kostelnick and David D. Roberts, describe as "visible information" (xvii). Part of the new Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication, the text addresses advanced students, professionals, and teachers. It would work, I'm sure, both in the classroom and as a self-paced guide for someone needing to brush up on how rhetorical principles apply to visual language. The principles cover both print and screen display.
The book expands on Kostelnick's "visual language matrix" refined through earlier publications. As readers of those articles know, he identifies four levels of design: intra (local variations, character by character or word by word, along a line-or many lines-of text); inter (headings and other spatial divisions of text to aid readability); extra (elements like pictures and data displays that operate outside the text by their own rules and in their own language); and supra (the whole document or series of documents and screens). Each level contains design elements in three "coding modes": textual, spatial, and graphic. The matrix is an excellent device for noticing, categorizing, and explaining what is going on in any example of visual language. In addition, the authors identify six "cognate strategies" (437) that further shape their discussion of each of these levels: arrangement, emphasis, clarity, conciseness,...