PowerPoint Presentation from Computers and Writing 2005. Describes how McCloud's big triangle, a heuristic for understanding visual communication, can be used as a guide to composing and designing new media products.

1. Scott McCloud’s Big Triangle and New Media Composition Kevin B rooks North Dakota State University Computers and Writing, 2005, Stanford University

2. Big Triangle in its simplest form A visual heuristic for analyzing and generating visual/verbal communication

7. Alternative or supplement to: CRAP: Non-Designers DB Visual Language Matrix Robin Williams Kostelnick and Roberts

8. Potentially a good fit with. . . The rhetorical triangle Albert Rouzie, http://jupiter.phy.ohiou.edu/~rouzie/fall151/rhetriang.gif An activity network Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Research http://www.edu.helsinki.fi/activity/pages/chatanddwr/chat/

9. From simple to complex: a relational database McCloud draws a separate plane for words, and suggests words are also used 1) realistically, 2) as icons, and 3) in abstract ways. Items do not have an absolute location on the big triangle, just a relational position: “more realistic than,” “more abstract than,” etc. Although not visible here, McCloud also shows words and pictures pushing each other around on the triangle: a dynamic relationship.

10. Rather than locate “meaning” along the bottom, and “abstractness” along the top, we make meaning out of abstract, iconic, and realistic images and words,but we tend to think that the meaning we make from iconic or realistic images is concrete and specific, rather than abstract and tenuous. Abstract meanings Visual icons and verbal cliches Realistic images and scientific prose High definition (hot) Low definition (cool) Clichés and icons are engaging and adaptable: “ May the force be with you.” Images and words strive for veracity through labels, definitions, descriptions: scientistic discourse. Concrete meanings Big Triangle Modified Myth: narratives and images are archetypal: simple in presentation, but rich in meaning. Realism as art in images and words: immediately recognizable, but more than they appear. Abstract art (visual and verbal): Non-representational, highly demanding Rather than place words on their own face of the triangle, words and images occupy the same space: sometimes working close together (iconic words and images), sometimes far apart (realistic words and iconic images or abstract images with iconic language).

16. ‘ Nothing is so beautiful as Spring..’ – Gerard Manley Hopkins