2 - Is It a Bird or Is It a Chameleon?

Summary

Chapter 2 considers aspects of visual design and explores the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of layout. It discusses the ways in which advertisers make use of visual resources to represent metaphors and metonymies. It shows how the same metaphor can be represented in multiple different ways leading to different processing or pragmatic effects. The chapter shows how two key dimensions of creativity (meaning and form) work together in the production and reception of figurative meaning in the context of advertising. It first reviews the ways in which scholars have operationalised ‘visual complexity’ as an experimental variable, and reports findings from the few studies that have attempted to measure its impact. It then proposes a new distinction based on the degree of schematicity versus content richness of the metaphorical/metonymic image. Schematic images contain very few visual elements to help the consumer interpret the message, whilst content-rich images contain numerous details on which the consumer can draw. In the final section, the chapter introduces another tool that advertisers can exploit in order to maximise the impact of visual creativity: that of colour.