[ENGL 527]

Discussion Question: Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis

While I think that using icon/pictorial graphics can work around this with more ease, how can bar or line graphs (or the other forms Drucker mentions) be designed to be both aesthetically pleasing/intriguing and rhetorically effective? Can the design impact not only what information is communicated, but how it is read? What I mean is, I think graphs are associated with certain disciplines/topic matters and communicate certain information in a certain way that is more expected/formed (trying to avoid adjectives like “dull”, or thoughts of “skip this chunk of the reading” here…).

For class this week, I designed a typographic logo for my webspace/scholarship that attempts to brand (maybe?) technical composition. While I have played with font before, I haven’t really experimented with downloading fonts (why?) or used a design platform outside of PowerPoint. So while it’s nothing fancy, it’s my first creation in Inkscape trying my hand at visual rhetoric without an image to drive/set the visual.

This logo was my first experiment with Inkscape. It started as a mass download of fonts. Deciding on what would be cast in this font was difficult; I wanted to create something that I could use. Given my present position in life/school, I thought creating something for my personal webspace I’m building would not only be useful, but cool. I chose “technical composition” from my current scholarship and MA project, and from how I’m being defined/imagined in the field as my work circulates in conferences, campus visits, and web exchanges. Technical composition writ large (started as):

After choosing a font, I had the start of my design. What I found more generative though, was the material the concept afforded me semiotically – technical, as I am using the term, comes from the Greek  techne, or craft. Visually, I thought this blends of with the word “technical” and “techne” was not only more novel, but actually served as more of a heuristic device for imagining an understanding of the concept as I am terming/conceptualizing it. From my research, techne has a certain relationship to assemblage – a composing of heterogeneous materials to form a composition (a dynamic whole). I attempted to illustrate this by constructing a composite line that comes together at the end.