The Space between Look and Read: Designing Complementary Meaning

Unleashing the potential that can be found in the space between words and images. Unleashing the potential that can be found in the space between words and images. Designers have long understood that image, text, and typeface can work together to produce new meanings, creating semiotic registers impossible to achieve with image or text alone. In The Space Between Look and Read, a study of complementary meaning in design, Susan Hagan presents a framework, called Inter-play, which explains how these new meanings emerge. Inter-play is not simply an analytical tool; it is also a method for using complementary meaning to encourage critical thinking in design audiences. Drawing from cognitive psychology, art theory, discourse analysis, design, and rhetoric, Hagan breaks down the synthesis of looking and reading into a complex series of registers, which are revealed through examples of excellent design. Thus, the book is both a theoretical exploration of how designers communicate and a casebook in communication well achieved. From the physiology of vision to the limits of language, from Allan Paivio to Uwe Loesch, The Space Between Look and Read expands our understanding of complementary design and argues that by engaging audiences through multiple cognitive registers, complementary design serves as a cognitive tool, helping audiences reach new conclusions about complex problems.

Table of Contents:
Series Foreword ix
Before in Time and Place: Shukran xv
Introduction: The Framer in the Framework: Roles, Relationships, and Outcomes 1
I Roles: Re-presentation with Re-articulation Create Meaning in Inter-play 
1 "What Difference Do the Differences Make?" 33
2 Inter-play Analysis in "Geschichte als Argument" 57
II Relationships: Binding Image, Text, and Typeface 
3 Grouping Ties: Noticing Relationships Built on Difference 79
4 Bridging Ties: Interpreting Connections between Independent Systems 99
III Unions to Outcomes: Inter-play as Complementary Meaning and an Untapped Opportunity 
5 Inter-play: Grouping and Bridging Ties Create Loose to Tight Unions 125
6 Complementary Meaning: Clarifying, Contradicting, and Challenging 147
7 Exploring "The Can't-or-Won't Conundrum": Weaving the Imagined with the Concrete 167
Notes 187
References 193
Index 207

About the Author :
Susan M. Hagan is Associate Teaching Professor in Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University's Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses.