Description
Book SynopsisIn this wide-ranging analysis, Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett demonstrate how visual language in professional communication - text design, data displays, illustrations - is shaped by conventional practices that are invented, codified, and modified by users in visual discourse communities.
Trade Review“Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett have written a useful and informative book that explores the relation of textual conventions of all sorts to the visual display of information. . . . [
Shaping Information] significantly enlarges how we think about conventions, and it will influence its readers to reconsider the arts of visual rhetoric.” — Stephen A. Bernhardt,
Rhetoric Review “[
Shaping Information] is a useful and important part of the discussion of visual communication. . . . This is a book worth reading and re-reading.” — Susan N. Smith,
Information Design Journal Document Design“
Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions by Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett provide[s an] accessible and welcome [addition] to the previously slim selection of book-length studies exploring the processes by which designers shape-and readers or users interpret-visual communication. . . .
Shaping Information [is a] fascinating [study] that promise[s] to enrich the teaching and study of visual communication now and in the future.” — Bege K. Bowers,
Technical Communication Quarterly“Kostelnick and Hassett have written a sound and much needed book. Their framework for visual convention not only organizes unexplored territory in visual theory but also provides a theoretical system and structure of convention that can be used by theorists of writing. Their book makes a satisfying and thoroughly convincing case for the rhetorical basis of visual design.”—David Kaufer,
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
