Visual Vestiges: Time, Rhetoric, and Information Design

Visual Vestiges explains how information design evolved over the centuries to make practical information clear, credible, and emotionally engaging.

In Visual Vestiges Charles Kostelnick analyzes the role of the past in understanding, studying, deploying, and teaching visual language in business, technical, and professional communication. He explores how information designs-text, pictures, icons, charts, and graphs-evolved to develop their rhetorical power and the many ways in which their vestigial forms permeate contemporary design. To explain these temporal dynamics, he examines the forces that underpin them: cultural shifts in aesthetics, taste, and values; social changes that redefine how we relate to one another rhetorically; and innovations in technology that transform the tools and channels we use to visualize and interpret information. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, art history, and historical and contemporary examples, Kostelnick explores the rhetorical role of time in bridging past and present design forms-by constantly regenerating them through visual conventions, by heightening pathos appeals through sentiment and nostalgia, and by bolstering ethos, amplifying epideictic displays, and narrating stories with text, pictures, and charts.

Charles Kostelnick is a Professor at Iowa State University. He is the author of Humanizing Visual Design: The Rhetoric of Human Forms in Practical Communication and coauthor, with Michael Hassett, of Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions.