Ball, Cheryl E., & Arola, Kristin L. (2010). visualizing composition (2nd ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. http://ix.bedfordstmartins.com [password required]
description [the ‘cover’ blurb]
ix visualizing composition is a concrete introduction to the fundamentals of multimodal composition. Each tutorial moves through the following three steps:
- Define. Illustrated definitions help you visualize principles of layout, design and composition: element, contrast, purpose, text, framing, audience, alignment, context, emphasis, color, proximity, organization, and sequence.
- Analyze. Guided readings of real-world texts—such as photographs, movie clips, comics, and animation—model how writers of different texts put theory into practice.
- Respond. Interactive assignments invite you to make your own rhetorical choices—determining font face or color, image hue, and the placement and organizational of visual and textual elements—and to write about the impact those choices have.
Note: This is the second edition of ix, the CD-ROM Arola and I co-authored in 2004. In this version, 9 of 13 tutorials (broken down by terms associated with rhetorical design choices) have been completely revised, with new and more multimodal examples and analyses.