Vier Blog

a. Capital letters have played a significant role in typography for a very long time. When scribes no longer were as needed and the printing press became more and more the way to do things, the illustrated letters began to take off rather rapidly. These oversized capital letters would draw the reader’s attention to the start of a page, a new chapter, and so on so that the reader knew a change had occurred within the type.

Capital letters today can do the same thing, especially in a non book sense. The examples Solomon uses in Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World, actually show that capitals can re-center a reader’s attention in the next or a different place in the text.

Also, in the same way we’ve become accompanied to a period ending a sentence, we’re programmed to see capitals at the start of one. This tells the audience that a new thought has begun.

b. Goffman’s theories are, for the most part, just as relevant as they were when this was published. In fact, Most of these advertising principles were around well before the ads Goffman presented.

Designer ring commercials these days will almost always use more than one of the principles Goffman talks about. A female will either present the ring, or she will receive it from a dominant male position. When she does receive it in the latter scenario, she will go ripe with emotion, showing both that she’s submissive to the gift recipient stereotype, and that you’ll have made her ecstatic by purchasing a certain brand.

No image for this blog, or blogs hereafter.

Happy 23^rd birthday to me.