reading post #4

I feel the second reading Robert E. Horn’s Visual Language is more appealing to me since two articles talk about pretty much same content: Visual Language/ visualization/mapping information. Robert used more images and shapes to interpret his theory: visual language is an integration of words, images, and shapes into a single communication unit. Text, images, and shapes cannot stand alone as visual language. Indeed, his article is more easily understood and remembered than the first one, which only contains few images.
Compared with Edward, Robert points out that shapes is another element which works effectively to drive reader’s attention to a certain sequence that the author designed. I also feel that arrows and lines are helpful for clarifying and managing messages in a short time.
In Edward’s article, I am impressed by his Vietnam Veterans Memorial example. Visitors take a visual measurement, what 58,000 means, when they look at the name of 58,000 dead soldiers’ name arrayed on the black granite yields. Each individual name makes a mark adding up the total amount.
Visual language is more powerful than works or images working alone. Biologically, our brain processes image much faster and effective than reading. We don’t even really to read an image when we collecting the basic information from an image such like the size of an image or what color it is. But we have to read every single word and analyse whether these words make any sense. And image has larger capacity of information and could be more detail than verbal paragraphs.