VISUAL PRINCIPLES

Prepared By: Catherine T. Espinosa

VISUAL PRINCIPLESplay a vital role in education and training.

In teaching, teachers have to be innovative in presenting lessons to students so that they will be clearly understood.

In this regard, the use of visual aids in teaching help teachers delivers their lessons to the students in a more creative and innovative way.

The Role of Visuals in Instruction

To provide concrete referent for ideas

(what word or symbol denotes)

Visuals are iconic, they have some resemblance to the thing they represent

The Role of Visuals in Instruction

Visuals can also motivate learners by attracting their attention, holding their attention, and generating emotional responses.

Visuals can simplify information that is difficult to understand.

VISUAL LITERACYIt's true that "a

picture is worth a thousand words."

A picture can stimulate the memory, and the memory becomes the learning. As teachers in a visual world, we must take advantage of every opportunity that comes our way.

VISUAL LITERACY

The term literacy once was used only to refer to reading and writing of verbal information, today visual literacy refer to the learned ability to interpret visual messages accurately to create such messages.

VISUAL LITERACY includes such areas as facial

expressions, body language, drawing, painting, sculpture, hand signs, street signs, international symbols, layout of the pictures and words in a textbook, the clarity of type fonts, computer images, student produced still pictures, sequences, movies or video, user friendly equipment design, critical analysis of television advertisements and many, many other things"

Visual Approaches of Visual Literacy

1. Input Strategy - helping learners to “decode” or read, visuals proficiently by practicing visual analysis like (picture analysis and discussion of multimedia and video programs).

Visual Approaches of Visual Literacy2. Output Strategy – helping

learners to “encode” or write visuals to express themselves and communicate with others (through planning and producing photo and video presentations

Developmental Effects

(Dwyer, 1978) “As a child gets older, he becomes more capable of attending selectively to those features of an instructional presentation that have the greatest potential for enhancing his learning of desired information.”

Cultural Effects

Different cultural groups may perceive visual materials in different ways.

Visual Preferences

in selecting visual, teachers have to make appropriate choices between the sorts of visuals that are preferred and those that are most effective.

The most important is, students develop their visual abilities by using them.

 Encoding: Creating Visuals

One skill nearly always included in visual education curricula is that of sequencing. It is the ability to sequence or arrange ideas in logical order. This is the extremely important factor in verbal literacy, especially in the ability to communicate in writing.

GOALS OF VISUAL DESIGN

Ensure legibility

The goal of good visual design is to remove as many as obstacles as possible that might impede transmission of your message.

GOALS OF VISUAL DESIGN

Reduce the effort required to interpret the message

As a designer you want to convey your message in such a way that viewers expend little effort making sense out of what they are setting and are free to use most of their mental for understanding the message itself.

GOALS OF VISUAL DESIGN

Increase the viewer’s active engagement with the message

A major goal is to make your visual as appealing as possible – to get the viewers’ attention and to entice them into thinking about your message. Choosing a style appropriate for your audience and using appealing color scheme also will help you gain and hold your audience.

GOALS OF VISUAL DESIGN

Focus attention on the most important parts of the message

Teachers, designers, and other who are create visual and verbal/visual displays face a series of design decisions about how to arrange the elements to achieve their goal.

GOALS OF VISUAL DESIGN

1. Elements: Selecting and assembling the visual elements to incorporate into the display.

2. Pattern: Choosing an underlying pattern for the elements of display.

3. Arrangement: Arranging the individual elements within the underlying pattern.

PROCESSES OF VISUAL DESIGN

ELEMENTSIncludes the visual elements (choosing the type of visual), the verbal elements (lettering style and location), and the elements that add appeal (surprise, texture, interaction).

Visual ElementsRealistic visuals show the actual

object under study. Using realistic can heighten the degree of realism. Effective communication is always best served by the most realistic visuals available.

Analogic visuals convey a concept or topic showing something else and implying a similarity.

Visual Elements

Organizational visual includes flowcharts, graphs, maps, schematics, and classification charts.

Verbal ElementsLetter Style

The style of the lettering should be consistent and should harmonize with the other elements of the visual.

Number of Lettering StylesA display or a series of related visuals, such as slide series should use not more than two different type styles, and these should harmonize with each other. For good communication you should have to limit the number of variations (bold, italic, underline, size changes) to a maximum of four.

Verbal ElementsCapitals

For best legibility, use lowercase letters, adding capitals only where normally required.

Color of Lettering“Figure-Ground Contrast”, the color of the

lettering should contrast with the background color both for the sake of simple legibility and for the sake emphasis in cases where you want to call particular attention to the verbal message.

Verbal ElementsSize of Lettering

The size of lettering is crucial for legibility.

Spacing Between LettersLetters in alphabet comes in different shapes like irregular, rectangular and circular shape. It may result to unevenness of the spacing. In order to solve this problem you have to space your letters by optical spacing or by estimating approximately equal amounts of white space between letters.

Verbal Elements

Spacing Between Lines

The vertical spacing between lines of printed material is also important for legibility. To achieve this legibility, use ruler to draw lines slightly on your blank layout.

 Elements that Add Appeal

Surprise - Grabs attention

Texture - It is the characteristic of three-dimensional objects and materials. It can convey a clearer idea of the subject to the viewer involving the sense of touch.

Elements that Add AppealInteraction - The R of the

ASSURE model (require learner participation) applies to all forms of media.

- PETER M. LESCHAK

"All of us are watchers – of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway - but few of us are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing."