I would like to welcome all of you to COMM 0800102 Principles of Visual Communication in its premier offering to College of Communication students either as a college requirement (2002 batch) or as equivalent to Readings in Mass Communication (2000 and 2001 batches).
The introduction of this course to the College of Communication study program is meant to achieve two objectives: (1) to expose our students to new trends in global communication education and (2) to raise awareness of dominant visual aspects of contemporary mass media. This course is about how visual messages are produced, delivered and perceived in a wide range of mass media outlets and forms including typography, photography, graphics, cartoons, animations, video, film and multimedia. The overall goal here is to create and enhance students’ appreciation of the power of images in modern communications.
Fundamentally “COMM 0800102” is about the way humans see. The main assumption underlying the course is that few people "see" well. All of us tune out much of the visual stimuli that bombard us daily. The visual stimuli we do attend to often fool us. Sometimes what we think we see isn't really there. This course is also about the way we use visual media to communicate. It's about the power of the visual image to persuade, coax, convince and even fool. An understanding of how we see and how we can use visual images to communicate is of prime value whether you plan to become a visual journalist, a verbal journalist or neither. It is important to understand that an emphasis on visual messages does not mean that words are considered less important than pictures. The most powerful, meaningful and culturally important messages are those that combine words and pictures in equally respectful ways. Visual communication, in fact, is an exploration into the idea that memorable visual messages with text have the greatest power to inform, educate, and persuade an individual. This course is an attempt to discover why some images are remembered.
I hope you find this course an interesting and useful source of knowledge about the significance of images in today's evolving mass media sector.
