Information Design Journal - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2008

As discourse increasingly depends on digital technologies, this article proposes an integrative view of text and the digital medium. As will be shown, authors and users of hypertexts constantly reflect on the appropriateness of manifold structural bonds holding between text composition and text design. In metapragmatic reflections, the users/readers relate a text’s audio-visual information to their previous knowledge of text design conventions. To describe the intermedial dimension of our metapragmatic analysis, we shall draw on Bolter and Grusin’s theory of Remediation (1999). Defining four elemental phases of remediation will then help to ascertain the full metapragmatic potential of text design for meaningmaking processes in both new and old media.

A rhetorical figure (for instance the antithesis in “Come in and find out” in a Dutch perfume ad) communicates an advertising message in an artfully divergent way. Two types of rhetorical figures are frequently distinguished, namely schemes (superficial decorations such as rhyme and alliteration) and tropes (meaningful deviations such as metaphors and puns). However, until now little attention has been paid to rhetorical figures that can be found in combinations of text and image (i.e., verbo-pictorial rhetorical figures). In this article, an experiment and interviews are presented on the effects of non-rhetorical figures, verbo-pictorial schemes and verbo-pictorial tropes on attitudes towards advertisements. In the experiment, twelve real-life advertisements (4 per category: non-rhetorical figure, scheme, and trope) were presented to 92 participants. The results show that attitudes towards ads with verbo-pictorial tropes (and advertisements without rhetorical figures) are less favourable than those towards advertisements with verbo-pictorial schemes. This could be explained by the fact that relatively more participants failed to come up with successful interpretations of the ads with these tropes and that attitudes were less favourable towards advertisements that were unsuccessfully interpreted than towards advertisements that were successfully interpreted.

Stories are often associated with entertainment, but they can also be used to convey serious information ranging from company policies to heath advice. Stories “consist of a sequence of thematically and temporally related end. This structure has many advantages, including the fact that individuals easily understand stories and learn from stories starting at a young age. Some psychologists have even argued that thought is fundamentally narrative in form (Schank & Abelson, 1995). This article will describe a theory of how narratives and stories can have persuasive effects – the idea that individuals can become transported into a narrative world, and as a result, integrate story information into their realworld belief structures (Green & Brock, 2000). It will then explore key research questions in narrative persuasion, provide suggestions for the effective use of narrative messages, and highlight issues in using narratives across media (text, audio, film, virtual reality).

This paper discusses results from a research study in the design and implementation of information documents and products in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). It presents a composite ethnographic and case study analysis of user-centred information design practices at the ATO from 2001-2005, and shows that the ATO has been an active proponent of user centred design practices in developing business information documents and products for an extended period of time, while also identifying potential opportunities to improve business simulation, design and product construction. The article highlights that user-centred design principles may have broad based application in both the public and private sectors.