Drawing on a wide range of visual production, this introductory text provides students with a clear conceptual framework for the explanation and analysis of visual culture, offering them an understanding of the discourses and vocabularies of visual and cultural practices. Beginning with commonsense notions of art and design, it shows how recent theorizing has been thrown into doubt and, in exploring the tensions between contesting explanations, aims to establish a more satisfactory definition and explanation of visual culture.

This text provides an accessible critical introduction to a variety of different analytic strategies for understanding the range of objects (paintings, sculpture, adverts, furniture, textiles, photography, fashion, etc.) that make up visual culture. Beginning with a discussion of what understanding can be taken to mean in relation to visual culture, it devotes separate chapters to different approaches to its study, using carefully chosen examples to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of these. The major figures associated with particular analytic strategies (Hebdige, Panofsky, Barthes,...

What is the point of graphic design? Is it advertising or is it art? What purpose does it serve in our society and culture? Malcolm Barnard explores how meaning and identity are at the core of every graphic design project and argues that the role and function of graphic design is, and always has been, communication.
Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches including those of Derrida, Saussure, Foucault, and Barthes, and taking examples from advertising, magazines, illustration, website design, comics, greetings cards and packaging, Graphic Design as Communication looks at how...

Most of our expereince is visual. We obtain most of our information and knowledge through sight, whether from reading books and newspapers, from watching television or from quickly glimpsing road signs. Many of our judgements and decisions, concerning where we live, what we shall drive and sit on and what we wear, are based on what places, cars, furniture and clothes look like. Much of our entertainment and recreation is visual, whether we visit art galleries, cinemas or read comics. This book concerns that visual experience. Why do we have the visual experiences we have? Why do the...