In this blog assignment, each of us will create an icon, logo, diagram, or visual aid for any one of the ongoing projects on this wiki. Along the way, we'll provide an critique/analysis of the functionality of the open source graphics image manipulation program known as GIMP, and/or it's free online user's manual, "Grokking the Gimp." Both the GIMP and the manual can be found on our course resources page.

Below, you'll find an article about the use of icons and logos in marketing--this is known as "branding." This background will introduce you to the fundamental concept of information compression, and alert you to what's at stake when we compose with images in an information economy. Every picture's worth a thousand words," we're told. But what other metrics can we use to measure the impact of images on our everyday lives? Blog it!

Audience, Dialogue, and the Commons: On the importance of actual audiences

In this article about

neural marketing , you can read about how marketing logos can affect your brain. Indeed, all of us, as rhetors, and individuals in common, seek to alter the consciousness of audiences. Branding is nothing new, really. Speakers and writers have always used and re-used commonplace and available rhetorical forms to alter the consciousness of listeners and readers. Branding today repetitiously uses language and images to brand itself upon our attention. The case of Pepsi and the Yin Yang symbol shows that these branding strategies very likely draw on common forms humans have long used to attract and re-direct attention. For example:

In 2003, the University of South Florida's athletic department switched to a new \"Iconic Bull\" logo

The swastika, an equilateral geometric figure, has been sampled and remixed--by diverse cultures, for diverse purposes--since the Neolithic age. However, this icosagon, which can take on different meanings according to simple rotations (in Hindu culture, right-facing can mean "evolutionary" whereas left-facing can mean "involutionary") became taboo in the West after it was infamously appropriated by Germany's Nazi Party.

One or Several Definitions

Archetypes and tropes as mediators between readers and writers.

definitional filters

English and E-Prime. Like Williams' prescriptions for "clarity" via agent-based prose, Robert Anton Wilson's "e-prime" exercises can help you refine your purpose, define your scope, and help you "pitch" your writing to the "key" of your audience.

Blog: using the GIMP, design an icon for your definition blog, or a classmate's definition blog