THE GOALS AND PRINCIPLES OF VISUAL

The goals and principles of visual

Edi Sukmara

a.      Ensure legibility

The goal of good visual design is to remove as many obstacles as possible that might impede transmission of the message. Therefore, visual media cannot replace the main means of presentation but it helps ensure the legibility of the teaching materials.

b.      Reduce mental effort

Through visual media the message can be conveyed in such a way that viewers expend little effort making sense out of what they are seeing and are free to use most of their mental effort for understanding the message itself.

c.       Increase active engagement

The major of the use of instructional media is to make the design as appealing as possible - to get viewers’ attention and to entice them into thinking about the message. Visual media can help teachers achieve this goal.

d.      Focus attention

The overall design pattern plus specific directional guides are the means for achieving the goal of focusing attention.

There are some factors influencing visual literacy, encoding and decoding skills such as:

a.      Developmental effects

Age of the learners may impact the way they literate the visual. For instance, the students who are older tend to summarize the whole scene and report a conclusion about the meaning of the picture.

b.      Cultural effects

Different cultural groups may perceive visual materials in different ways. For example, the instruction that includes visual description of the family may bear different interpretations among the students from different cultural background.

c.       Visual preferences

In selecting visuals, teachers have to make appropriate choices between the sorts of visuals that are preferred and those that are most effective as people do not necessarily learn best from the kinds of pictures they prefer to look at.

Bibliography

Picturing books: A web site about picture books. Available at

Htp://picturingbooks.imaginaryland.org/