International Visual Literacy Association

IVLA is a not-for-profit association of educators, artists, and researchers dedicated to the principles of visual literacy. IVLA was formed for the purpose of providing education, instruction and training in modes of visual communication and the application through the concept of visual literacy to individuals, groups, organizations, and to the public in general. Our members represent a wide range of disciplines including the arts, sciences, education, communication, business, videography, photography, instructional technology, health, and computer applications. We hope you will feel free to join us in the lively debates of our field, and we look forward to forming lasting professional and personal friendships.

International Visual Literacy Association. Organizations>Graphic Design>Rhetoric>Visual Rhetoric

Visual Literacy Bibliography

The study of visual communication is a multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional effort. People who write on this topic come from mass communication (including photography, advertising, and news editorial areas), film and cinema studies, education, art and aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, architecture and even archaeology. This rich melange of viewpoints is an asset because of the insights that come from cross-fertilization, however it causes some problems academically for those of us who teach visual communication because of a lack of any sense of common theory. This is not to suggest that there is or should be a central of core theory that organizes the field, however, it would be easier to order a curriculum, as well as a graduate program of study, if there were some notion of at least the important theories and scholars from the various disciplines that need to be covered. This project looks at the body of literature and the categories that emerge from the writings to develop a taxonomy of topics and some sense of the location of the most important, or at least the most frequently written about, areas of study. The objective is to collect the scholarly writing on the most central visual communication topics (mental imagery, visual thinking, the language metaphor, psychology), as well as peripheral topics that interweave with visual communication, such as sociology, anthropology, archaeology and architecture.

Moriarty, Sandra and Keith Kenney. International Visual Literacy Association. Resources>Bibliographies>Information Design>Visual Rhetoric

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

An interactive presentation of a variety of visualization techniques used by graphic designers, technical illustrators and document designers to convey information.

Lengler, Ralph and Martin J. Eppler. Visual Literacy (2009). Presentations>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Visual Rhetoric

On User Interface Design, Part I

The first of a pair of presentations by Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame). The presentation is from 1983 and discusses the development of user interface design from the 1960s onward.

Kay, Alan. Visual Literacy (1983). Articles>User Interface>History>Podcasts