Visual Communication: More than Meets the Eye

Whether we’re driving on the interstate highway or trying to find a new restaurant in the city, posted signs are our primary tools for navigating the world. In Visual Communication, Harry Jamieson offers a thorough analysis of this important form of communication and investigates the intricate processes behind our interaction with signs.

In a groundbreaking departure from standard aesthetic and graphic-based analyses, Jamieson probes the complex connection between perception and linguistics in the use of signs. He proposes new approaches to understanding the visual experience through the use of information and language theory, and he examines the underlying ideas within visual communication studies, rather than the solutions the field proposes—but without neglecting the practical aspects of these theoretical ideas. A comprehensive resource, Visual Communication will be an essential read for scholars in media studies, visual arts, sociology, and cultural studies.


“Visual Communication brings back all the fervour and insight of the best analyses of visual communication and it contains numerous insights to help media practitioners, artists and educational designers to understand their crafts. Jamieson goes beyond the descriptive approach typical of broadcast and media studies analysts, and treats underlying themes of the visual in art and the media. I have often felt that Harry Jamieson’s ideas were about 10 years ahead of their times.”—Jon Baggaley, Learning, Media and Technology

“This text purports to offer a new means of understanding visual communication. This is an interesting text and its area of application may veer more towards the artistic than media; the subjects covered, the terms used, authors cited and general feel to the book orientate it not so much within the cultural studies sphere but within a subsection of the creative and artistic practice arena.”—Marcus Leaning, Higher Education Academy

“The visual arts are more than visual and more than aesthetic expression. Behind their visual surfaces, they tell us how the body and its organs create the knowable and meaningful forms that sustain human existence, how the organs and senses construct the human world out of the latent and invisible forces that mediate the body as primitive feelings and sensations. The significance of Jamieson’s book is that it addresses the subject of the visual arts from this wider vantage point. For Jamieson, the visual arts reveal visual communication as the means by which the body and its organs communicate with its surrounding forms.”—Robert Cooper, Keele University, United Kingdom