Visual Communication

This article examines how five bakeries in a mid-sized Swedish town communicate with their (potential) customers using different forms of ‘authentic’ displays of the much-loved seasonal pastry, the semla (a particular type of Lenten bun). Authenticity is understood as strategies of communicating with potential customers and passers-by in ways that make them feel included in a successful, sociable relationship with the bakery in question (see Scannell’s, 2001, article, ‘Authenticity and experience’). Specifically, various semla artefacts are used in the shop window/entrance as strategies to ‘talk to and interact with’ passers-by. However, these semla displays are not recognized as advertising by the bakers themselves. While previous research on authenticity, food discourse and ideology have identified traditional, natural and elite authenticity as expressed in relation to specific social groups, this study shows how authenticity may harbour oppositional values and seemingly incoherent ways of addressing customers in relation to such questions as power, eliteness and class. One explanation for these more subtly distinctive authenticity performances may be found in Swedish culture which has less social class distinction. This may, in turn, mean that certain establishments and products may not be as prominently class imprinted as others when it comes to how they address customers. Such a culture may create a more blended range of authenticity expressions.

This article explores the use of screenshots as a form of visual evidence on social media platforms. It considers their role in YouTube videos that spread misinformation and disinformation about the Notre Dame Cathedral Fire and an internet hoax, the Momo Challenge. The article draws on two social semiotic frameworks, legitimation (Van Leeuwen in ‘Legitimation in discourse and communication, 2007) and affiliation (Knight in ‘Evaluating experience in funny ways’, 2013, and Zappavigna in ‘Searchable Talk and Social Media Metadiscourse’, 2018), to analyse how screenshots and accompanying voiceovers construe technological authority and propagate social values. Seven key forms of screenshots are identified in the dataset, alongside the key social bonds that are made visually salient in the screenshots. Overall, this research contributes to how we understand the role of screenshots in instances of misinformation and disinformation, highlighting the importance of identifying the affiliation potential of the screenshot in order to determine its veracity.

In October 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria declared that the three highest denominations of the Nigerian currency would be redesigned in order to strengthen the country’s cashless policy. This led to several protests involving loss of lives, due to scarcity of cash and limited access to electronic payment. This study examines WhatsApp memes that were circulated during the enforcement of the Naira redesign policy, with a view to investigating the ideological representations of the effect of the policy on Nigerians. The purposively selected data are analysed qualitatively from a multimodal critical discourse analytical framework. The findings reveal that the memes are discursively constructed in order to depict Nigerian citizens as victims of the policy, exploitation of the masses by other citizens and inadequacy of commercial banks as perpetrators, amid other representations. The study concludes that the memes are used to project an anti-welfarist ideology of the government.

This article explores how chemical images in school chemistry realize knowledge from a social semiotics perspective. Drawing on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2021[1996]) visual grammar framework (Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design) and Doran and Martin’s (2021) field model (Field Relations: Understanding Scientific Explanation), this study reveals that these chemical images are characterized by employing recursive embeddings of analytical structures to realize multiple levels of compositional taxonomies of matter and multi-levelled taxonomy structures to expand the depth and breadth of classificational taxonomies of matter. These images employ a special narrative structure, referred to as the transformation process, to represent changes of matter. These processes can be complex in themselves or combined with agentive narrative processes to realize various activities related to changes of matter. Furthermore, chemical images utilize both symbolic and imagic resources to realize a wide range of properties associated with matter and its changes, with symbolic resources representing typological qualitative properties and images typically construing topological properties. These field meanings collectively shape part of the disciplinary affordance of chemical images in school chemistry in organizing chemistry knowledge. This study contributes to expanding the grammatical description of images to the discipline of chemistry.

This article examines how Fridays for Future Germany (FFFG) uses photographs of climate protests to convey the politics of climate change to wider audiences. The author argues that FFFG is an ideal-type form of visual activism in which visual imagery is central to its climate activism. The article builds on climate change communication scholarship and visual social movement studies to contribute an inquiry about FFFG’s visual activism. The focus is on FFFG’s visual self-representations on the social media platform Flickr, which promises to give insights into its strategies of self-legitimation. The empirical analysis discusses the recurring visual patterns in FFFG’s visual activism based on illustrative examples and provides an interpretive reading about the implications of certain ways of seeing and showing climate action. The conclusion puts the findings in a wider political context, highlighting the importance of visualization in the (self-)legitimation of FFFG in debates about global climate governance.

Comics have increasingly served as a tool for delivering scientific information to diverse audiences. However, little is known about how visual elements in comics influence their persuasive potential. Inspired by McCloud (1993)’s ‘masking effect’ theory featured in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, this study examined how different degrees of realism in comic characters, combined with background details, affected readers’ character identification. The findings suggested that exposure to comics featuring unrealistic, cartoonish characters minimized the gap in character identification between Black and white US participants. Contrary to McCloud’s hypotheses, exposure to comics with less detailed backgrounds resulted in higher character identification across conditions, regardless of character realism. The authors discuss the implications for future research and practice of using comics for public communication of science.

Previous studies on smiling face emojis mainly focus on how they are employed by the addresser for rapport management, with limited attention given to exploring the addressee’s interpretation of smiling face emojis. This study aims to explore whether smiling face emojis are interpreted as (im)polite in a virtual communication context and what factors might influence the interpretation. When carrying out the research, the author designed stimuli with 10 commonly used smiling face emojis in WeChat and then recruited 192 participants to take part in an experimental study. The results indicate that smiling face emojis enhance the politeness degree of an utterance while mitigating potential impolite intentions. They also indicate that the interpretation of politeness in utterances with smiling face emojis is influenced by age and gender. In addition, the interpretation of smiling face emojis is tightly related to the culture of politeness (礼) and internet culture. This article helps us to understand the use of smiling face emojis and the management of interpersonal relationships in a visual communication context.

In recent years, a growing trend of abstract and experimental animation has emerged in Hong Kong, with an increasing number of works produced over the last two decades, particularly since around 2015. This article examines how Hong Kong artists approach abstract animation, the predominant aesthetic trends, and how these trends relate to or diverge from Western traditions in visual music, following pioneers such as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith and Norman McLaren. Employing content analysis, as used by Emmanouil Kanellos (2018) and textual analysis, this study investigates 95 selected works from the Relentless Melt screening series curated by Max Hattler and organized by the Hong Kong-based society Relentless Melt. By categorizing the data under two separate systems – the ‘What System’ and the ‘Where System’, as suggested by Margaret Livingstone in Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (2002) – the analysis encompasses aspects related to the perception or recognition of objects, faces, or other properties under the ‘What System’, and the perception of motion, depth, spatial organization and figure/ground segregation under the ‘Where System’. Unlike pioneering visual music artists who largely abandoned mimetic constructions in their aesthetics, some Hong Kong artists employ various types of representational abstraction. In addition, many do not shy away from expressing concepts or narratives in their hybrid visual music works while retaining fundamental elements, such as audio-visual synchronization. This project represents an initial step towards a more systematic understanding of Hong Kong’s visual music practices, aiming to promote plurality over homogeneity by critically examining the multiple facets of artistic practice in Hong Kong. It is hoped that this study will contribute to international scholarly discourse and establish a trajectory for further exploration.

Perfume bottles represent the gender identity associated with perfume, reflecting the transition in gender construction from binary to fluid in contemporary society. From the perspective of Butler’s heterosexual matrix theory (Gender Trouble, 1990), this study examines the representation of the binary gender system and gender fluidity in perfume bottles by combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. The findings indicate that, generally, the visual representation of perfume bottles fundamentally follows the binary gender system. The bottles of women’s and men’s fragrances differ significantly in colour and shape, reflecting heterosexual relationships in metaphor/metonymy and text. Unisex fragrances basically adopt a masculine visual style. In addition, a small yet increasing number of perfume bottles represent gender fluidity in two aspects. On the one hand, perfume bottles have emerged as vehicles of female subjectivity, objectification of men and gender diversity. By changing the representation of sex, gender and desire, perfume bottles transcend traditional gender construction. On the other hand, the gender representation of perfume bottles has gradually become more diverse and fluid over time.

Instagram is a social networking site widely used in political communication, with candidates and parties throughout the world developing profiles and managing their images on this site. However, research focusing on Instagram is still limited in comparison to production aimed at other networks – a research gap which is reflected in the scarcity of studies on Instagram political communication in Spain. This article aims to broaden the literature on Instagram use by addressing the profiles of political parties instead of individual candidates, by focusing on regional parties instead of national ones and by shedding light on underexplored aspects of visual political communication. To do so, the authors focus on the Spanish Autonomous Region of Andalusia and content-analyse the way in which political parties in this region manage their visual presence. The sample consists of 1,805 Instagram posts collected from the official profiles of the five parties with parliamentary seats in Andalusia. The content analysis of the posts is based on variables related to visual aspects of the images being published: visual content and formats, presence of party leaders, party symbolism and the predominant colours used in publications. Results indicate that Instagram’s visual content depicts party symbolism and uses colour in a strategic way. However, the personal presence of leaders is not exploited equally by all parties, indicating that the management of political image on social media differs between parties.

This study argues for a distinction between visual art and visual image in our understanding and analysis of visual communication. Referring to the social semiotic model of verbal art by Ruqaiya Hasan, the study proposes a semiotic system of visual art, which is related to, but distinct from the semiotic system of visual image. In the semiotic system of visual image, lines and shapes rendered through various techniques depict entities that serve three functions: the representational, modal and compositional functions. In the semiotic system of visual art, symbolic configuration endows the visually shown entities with deeper, more abstract meanings by creating recurrent patterns in the visual art as a genre, against its artistic and cultural conventions. These meanings help to realize the theme: it is what a work of visual art is about when dissociated from the particularities of that work. By way of illustration, an empirical study on the landscape painting in dynastic China is provided, with a focus on the embedded human figures and how they contribute to the theme of the paintings.

In the data-intensive world of astronomy, visualization emerges as a crucial interpretive tool, bridging the gap between vast information and human understanding. This article uses visualization to explore the unexpected connection between astronomy and polaritonics, a field focused on light–matter interactions in microstructures. The author introduces a playful challenge of distinguishing images from either field, emphasizing the role of visual data in making complex scientific concepts accessible and encouraging cross-disciplinary engagement and a sense of shared wonder.