Textual Meaning: Visual Design
Information values are realised by the placement of the elements of a composition.
The role of any particular element in the whole depends on whether it is placed on the
left or on the right, in the centre or the margin, or in the upper or the lower part of the
picture space, page, or screen. Throughout the chapters in Part II of the thesis I
examine these information values in relation to the visual design of the screen space
in the computer applications.
In societies which use Roman script the direction of the reading of a text (left to right,
from top to bottom) has led to different cultural values being awarded to the left and
the right. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen left-right placement creates a given-
new structure. The elements placed on the left are presented as ‘given’, the elements
placed on the right as ‘new’. For something to be given means that it is presented as
something the viewer or reader already knows, as a familiar and agreed departure
point for the message. For something to be new means that it is presented as
something not yet known to, and not yet already agreed upon by the viewer or reader,
hence as something to which the viewer or reader must pay special attention. The new
is therefore problematic, contestable, the information at issue, while the given is
presented as Commonsensical and self-evident. Again, this is a meaning potential
which becomes precise in the working of a specific sign and will get more specific
contours in the context of specific images.
The ‘bottom’ and the ‘top’ of the visual space also present a meaning potential. If
some a constituent element is placed on top and another at the bottom of a visual
space, then what is placed on top is presented as what Kress and Van Leeuwen call
the ‘ideal’, and what is placed at the bottom as the ‘real’. For something to be ideal
means that it is presented as the idealised or generalised essence of the information,
hence usually also as its ideologically most salient part. The real is then opposed to
this in that it is its meaning potential to present more down to earth information.
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