Rhetoric

PART ONE: research
I first started out with this project with research and figuring out what rhetoric is.

Definitions:
the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.
language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.
The ends justify the means

Nice Quotes:

• “Every manufactured item send out signals to the mind or emotions. These signals - strong or weak, wanted or unwanted, clear or hidden, create feelings.” - Dieter Rams
  
• “For Rhetoric, language is never simply a form of expression: it is a functional tool that is manipulated to achieve desired ends.” - Ellen Lupton
  
• “Misunderstanding associates rhetoric with the bombastic and hollow, with fraud and seduction, with deceit and sheer ornamentation. The long history of this art, in contrast to popular assumptions, tells us that rhetoric has been concerned with imagination, form-giving, and with the appropriate use of language to facilitate human affairs.” - Ellen Lupton

Rhetoric in Design: Notes
Rhetoric is connected to persuasion
Can be defined as guidelines to construct appropriate messages.
Can be seen as a mean to provide the audience with the reasons for a specific change
The choices of graphic designers make while designing a piece - compositions, typefaces, images, styles, etc. - affect the way viewers understand it and are rhetorical choices.
Kenneth Burke - every way of human communication is somehow filled with rhetoric.
Since GD is a type of communication, all graphic products have a rhetorical function, since it aims to change / persuade people’s behaviour in some way


PART TWO: making
We started to explore rhetoric by making examples of it which could be:
Hyperbole, Irony, Parody, etc.

I wanted to stick with my social issue (factory farming) even though I found it really difficult. I did hyperbole since not a lot of people dealt with that and I wasn't comfortable making light about it.
This is how they turned out:

 
 









I really wasn't enjoying working with my social issue so I decided to start some other things which brought me to this
(Adam's Apple)








PART THREE: final project
This pushed me into a lot of food puns, I had several ideas but I decided to do actual snacks / food I could serve along with my puns. This is the puns just by themselves:

PART FOUR
Here are the photographs of my pieces with actual food, I printed them on card stock and elongated them so they can stay up (tent style).

now everyone gets to have the snacks!

 PART FOUR: reflection
understanding of the relationship between rhetoric, semiotics, and modes of appeal.

Semiotics is how meaning is constructed and understood. Through this study representation is key - meanings can be understood by just adding or subtracting signs / symbols that are representing something. These signs / symbols can also be interpreted in several different ways depending on the context on how / where it is applied and are usually straightforward enough to be recognized, figured out, or learned. The reader directly applies their prior knowledge of signs to decode meaning. The component parts (signs, symbols, icons, etc) of semiotics can be placed together to form meaning in order to persuade, and even appeal.
Rhetoric is a tool that uses several different strategies to compel persuasion. These strategies can be broken down into three modes of appeal - ethos (ethical appeal), pathos (emotional appeal), & logos (logical appeal). When trying to persuade, the rhetorical devices of persuasion always fits into these three categories of appeal. There are several rhetorical devices, two common devices are irony and metaphor. Irony deals with humor to convey a certain message of almost ridicule to the viewer - so, irony would be categorized under pathos because it is an emotional appeal. The use of metaphor in conveys a new idea or meaning by linking it to an existing idea or meaning with which the audience is already familiar, in hopes to help the audience understand the new concept. So, metaphor would be categorized under logos because it is a logical appeal.