Visual Comm

My personal opinion of the website is that it is nice.  Components or widgets are separated or defined differently enough for you to not confused, or make it seem cluttered.  The completely white background is currently following a trend, where everything is white with the components are being layered with box-shadowing to add emphasis.  Also helps with the coloring they chose, as it stands out well against the white.

One of the major tips this site doesn’t follow the book mentions is that buttons should change color when your cursor, to identify that it’s a button.  Now even without it, I found no trouble distinguishing what was a button or not, or even link.  I am not totally sure I agree with this tip 100% of the time.

Another major tip this book gives is that you should we weary about drop-down menus.  I think at least more recently, this tip is not useful.  I am not sure of any major website that doesn’t utilize at least one, as it majorly helps with categorizing pages and or posts.  This website has them, and I find they work well, as well as it allows them to keep the main navigation clean and free of clutter.

The other tip I really don’t agree with is that you should always include your home page in your main navigation.  Reason I disagree with this is that it’s becoming a trend to remove the home button, and just using the logo to go back to the home page or to have breadcrumbs on the pages.  Not saying to have the home page is bad, and most of the time....this tip is right.  But sometimes its just as good to not have it as it is.  Depends on the design.  This design utilizes it.  

I probably could have payed attention to the elements better, I more was amazed how great the camera on my phone is.  I do like the lighting and the angles of my shots though.

The data in this infographic is about the increase of electronic data the census of governments will collect on the government’s economic activity.  There isn’t an exact source listed, but its the Census Bureau giving data about their own methods, so I guess they would be their own source.  In a way yes and no, they show some data percentages early own about what it will increase too, and they show how in each year their systems are improving.  But I wouldn’t necessarily call this data, just predicted outcome.  Which to be honest isn’t believable since its coming from the government.

I think that the mix of a grey and white background is definitely there to help direct the eye more, and better read what this is about, plus the use of images and viewing-order based charts.  I think visually its nice, but I think there is a bit of chart junk.  I think that the charts in some instances can be brought together.  Some almost seem about the same thing.  Almost feels they wanted to make this fancier and more important than it is.

Decorative/Script Typeface I can see why they used the decorative typeface with the regular font, and I think visually it’s very pretty.  But I think with the way schools are starting to remove the teaching of cursive, that it could be a bad idea to include in a policies and procedures sheet.  For now it’s fine, but at some point...students won’t be able to read it.

This ad demonstrates movement because of the images it uses force your eyes to move over to other parts of the design, such as the map of flight travel and the companies logo/information.

The reason I chose this picture, is because I think through out American history; we have had a lot of issues in regards to the ethical practices of food production.  This image is of the nutritional facts and ingredients of Coca-Cola, and the part I wanted to focus on was the ingredients, “natural flavors.”  Upon doing some of my own research, “natural flavors” isn’t as straight forward and upfront as we really want to think.   In an article from CNN, Senior Scientist David Andrews of the Environmental Working Group reports that “natural and artificial flavors” are actually quite similar.  The differences between them are quite small.  The biggest difference is that natural flavors come form a natural source, but if you take orange juice for an example; the natural flavors most likely isn’t actually “orange juice.”  That it’s a part of the product, that’s been modified chemically and added to the food or product, in order to keep consistent flavor for all of the products.  The other big issue with the “natural flavor” phrase is they don’t tell you how many “flavors” it really is.  Also according to Andrews, it could be around 50 to 100 ingredients. The problem I see with this, and people already voice their concerns or opinions on this.  Is that writing “natural flavors” is a legal, but sneaky way of hiding the addition of ingredients.  It can trick unsuspecting people, and can be very damaging for people’s bodies.  Not all allergen containing products are label.   For example, if someone who has food allergies were to eating something that was “natural flavored” by something that is deadly to them, such as Gluten.  So in regards to the lack of transparency in the meaning of label phrases, this practice is completely unethical. Picture source: http://nancyappleton.com/

1. To me visual literacy means the ability to see, understand or critically think about the context, clues and rules to both civil and social society through visuals.  Either it be images, videos, graphics, human or animal behavior, or just anything that can be visual seen.

2. The sentence that resonated the most from the reading would have to be “ “ON TEMPORARY CULTURE HAS BECOME INCREASINGLY DEPENDENT ON THE VISUAL ESPECIALLY FOR IT CAPACITY TO COMMUNICATE INSTANTLY AND UNIVERSALLY.”  The reason is because I think this sentence is a perfect example of how the internet has changed our society.  Things become a trend or extremely popular almost instantly.  Memes, videos or just posts in general.