Despite the differing contexts and purposes for which documents are created, readers would be hard pressed to find even o. В основе анализа лежат два компонента nt. Even the seemingly most benign of documents, such as instructions and informational pamphlets must persuade readers to spend the time and effort it takes to understand them, and many communicators consider these peripheral persuasive qualities when they develop these materials. Communicators who create documents that are purposefully persuasive, such as legal cases, proposals, make even more focused efforts to develop text that incites readers to respond to their needs or desires. These creators are often well versed in the rhetoric of linguistic persuasion; nevertheless, even in a day when desk top publishing, which provides communicators with tools to create visually complex documents has become common, many often fail to consider the rhetoric of visual persuasion. It is important that document developers consider the visual rhetoric of their work because visual and even tactile qualities of documents can contribute to or detract from their effectiveness. In fact, "the most effective documents are those that use both words and design to reveal and reinforce the structure of information in a text" (Benson 35).

The field of rhetoric and technical communication is built upon a long history of analysis of document design. Of the many articles and books on the subject, work by Edward Tufte in Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Charles Kostelnick's "The Rhetoric of Text Design in Professional Communication" and "Visual Rhetoric: A Reader-Oriented Approach to Graphics and Design," Kevin Mullett and Darrell Sano's Designing Visual Interfaces, and Karen Schriver's "Dynamics in Document Design", as well as specific treatment of typography in James Craig's "Designing with Type" provide excellent bases from which to analyze and understand the rhetoric of visual design in documentation. Document designers and analysts note particularly the impact of visual rhetoric, for as Kostelnick points out, "visual language plays an essential role in the rhetoric of technical documents, transforming the linguistic text through structural and stylistic cues that operate on different levels within the text" (The Rhetoric of Text Design 189). In this article, I illustrate the essential role that visual rhetoric plays in a specific example of persuasive documentation. I focus narrowly on one element of persuasive visual rhetoric by examining the credibility of an Apple political candidacy flyer.

The Unseen Power of Visual Rhetoric

John Berger, art theorist, that we experience and respond to what is visual before we understand and respond to linguistic text. If his thesis is correct, then understanding the power of visual persuasion is particularly important when designing work with intentionally persuasive goals since visual elements can be used to heighten persuasion. To design visually persuasive documents, a communicator must first understand the fundamental elements of any communication that embodies effective persuasion, whether it is linguistic, typographic, or graphic. Among the many qualities of effective persuasion outlined in Stephen Toulmin's "The Uses of Argument", as well as many other works treating argumentation and persuasion, credibility is essential to the act of persuasion. I focus on credibility as a means to illustrate one aspect of persuasive visual rhetoric. By analyzing an election campaign flyer used to support Peter Borisovich Shelish, candidate for Deputy of the Duma, running under the Apple party in St. Petersburg, Russia, I illustrate how visual rhetoric can both support and destroy credibility.

Concept of Credibility

Credibility is comprised of the qualities of being believable, trustworthy, and reliable. Where individuals, groups, and organizations can develop credibility through actions, the document designer must also imbue a physical artifact, the document, with qualities of believability, trustworthiness, and reliability to reach the same goal. To make a piece of paper, computer or television screen, or other non-human, representational object credible requires an understanding many elements, but I focus here on two that lead to readers' perception of a document as credible: quality and substance.

Quality and Substance as Elements of Credibility

There is a large body of work that attempts to define the concept of quality, and Karen Schriver provides detailed analysis of this as well as its application in "Quality in Document Design: Issues and Controversies." For purposes of this article, however, I use the lay definition of quality that denotes value, worth, significance, importance, benefit, and desirability. I use the term substance to indicate the body of meaning in a document, its textual material, as well as its material form. Just as a person's linguistic or behavioral messages provide abstract markers of quality and substance, a document contains visual characteristics that can lead readers to perceive quality and substance, or their lack.

Quality

Readers are exposed to professional documentation today in television, magazines, advertising, and the Internet, and have come to expect a sense of quality from even the most common documentation they encounter every day. When viewing print materials in particular, readers look for "polish and elegance [that] they associate with the conventional book" because they are "used to seeing printers' type skillfully and conventionally handled" (Stopford 75). To illustrate how document design in print materials conveys a positive sense of quality and substance, in this article I analyze a political flyer promoting Peter Borisovich Shelish as a candidate for Deputy Duma, St. Petersburg, Russia, running under the Apple party. Although issues in document design may seem insignificant when addressing candidacy for high political office, "design elements do not transmit the text passively: [they] are rhetorically active because they affect the reader's reception of the message" (Kostelnick 189). Therefore, it is important to determine the rhetorical effectiveness of design, especially in material that may sway a constituency's political choice.

The abstract character of quality is often expressed connotatively through visual markers. Before personal computers and desktop publishing became common, fonts (typestyles) such as Palatino, Times Roman, and New York could only be produced through the expensive process of professional typesetting. Individuals who produced their own documents, using typewriters, had no choice but to use Courier font that was the typewriter standard. Readers began to associate quality with fonts like Palatino or Times Roman, that could only be set professionally, to the extent that these fonts still carry a connotative meaning of quality even though today they are widely used by nonprofessional communicators in desktop publishing on personal computers.

Documents that are set with intentional, often professional layouts are more indicative of quality than those that simply contain text that flows from one paragraph block to the next. Centering text and varying type sizes and font choices, for instance, require intentional acts of design that can carry the connotative marker of quality. Document layout, font size and style, leading, and kerning choices affect the communicative quality of documents in complex ways; effective design most often requires in-depth study of the research in this area as a basis for making choices. As a result, effective design often indicates quality. (The field of technical communication is replete with extensive research on this topic, which I treat only lightly here, but for deeper study, in addition to other sources, see Schriver, "Dynamics of Document Design", Norman, "The Design of Everyday Things", and Horton, "Designing and Writing Online Documentation").

Visual markers of monetary expense also connote quality. Professional printing is more expensive than desktop publishing, thus, the expense of professional printing lends to a characterization of quality. In addition, the expense of the paper on which documents are printed can add to perception of their relative quality. Heavier weighted and textured papers are generally more expensive than thin, non-textured materials and are considered high in quality. Print materials that are relatively expensive, such as coated papers with a glossy sheen and large-sized papers are also more expensive and indicate quality. Color can also be a visual marker of quality, since colored papers and inks are usually more expensive than plain white paper and black ink.

Substance

Where credibility is supported by quality, it is also associated with substance, both material and linguistic. Substance is in some ways less abstract than quality, even though quality is often also associated with visual substance indicated through strong, clear fonts and a design that takes full advantage of the space on a page while maintaining readability. But substance is also a very concrete aspect of a document. The sheer bulk of a document, its physical and tactile weight that can be perceived visually, may also lead to perceptions of credibility. This occurs in part because weight can be related to expense, as noted above, but also because the tactile qualities of a document registers with readers in visceral ways, even if they never actually touch the document. Texture and weight embody the concept of substance itself, thus strongly affect readers' perceptions of quality.

Substance is of course, also related to the linguistic contents of a document. Material that says nothing of import or includes text that cannot be understood affects the quality of the document negatively. Readers perceive materials as credible only when they impart information that readers can read and understand. Analysis of the substance and quality in an Apple candidate's political flyer reveals the importance of visual rhetoric in imparting or hindering these elements of credibility that are important to a campaigner's goals.

Analysis of the Visual Rhetoric in an Apple Political Flyer

To elicit votes from constituents, Peter Borisovich Shelish, candidate for Deputy of the Duma running under the Apple party in St. Petersburg, Russia, distributed campaign flyers to advertise his attributes. The actual impact of his flyers will be tested at election time, but here, analysis of his campaign literature is instructive for understanding the effect of visual rhetoric on credibility of documentation. Like most documents, Shelish's campaign flyers are a mixed bag, containing qualities that at times support and sometimes defeat readers' perceptions of the documents' credibility. Among other persuasive elements, the Apple candidacy flyer reflects issues of credibility categories of quality and substance, discussed below (See Figures 1 and 2 for graphic representations of the document discussed).

Analysis of Quality in the Apple Flyer

In many respects, the visual rhetoric of the Apple candidacy flyer indicates a high level of credibility. The flyer is printed on heavy, textured near card stock paper, the size of two standard A4 pages. The document is a single fold, creating 4 sides that form a front cover, 2 inside pages, and a back cover. The flyer is folded, adding extra bulk to the document, emphasizing the connotation of quality already present as a result of the expense involved in producing flyers on large sized, textured, heavy card stock. The flyer is professionally printed, and indicated as such in small print on the back cover of the flyer, also adding to the connotation of quality. The paper is a more expensive creme color, printed with black ink that is relatively inexpensive, but appropriately conservative for a purpose of this sort, thus, the combination of the paper and ink color together still supports the flyer's reception as high quality (see figure 1).

figure 1

The fonts on the front cover of the Apply flyer are varied, including large sized, 18 and 16 point, heavily bolded sans serif Helvetica font, a non-bold Courier font set in 12 point type size, and a relatively small Times Roman font set in 9 point type size. All fonts other than Courier imply the quality of a professional typesetter. Although the flyer's designers violated a basic "rule" of good document design and used more than two fonts in one document, the very small 9 point type size is barely noticeable, thus the different font does not stand out. The content of the text set in small type is requisite for campaign literature, but is not particularly useful to the reader, so it is of no consequence that it is not highly visible.

The document layout on the front cover of the flyer is adequate, indicating professionalism to an average reader, but does not in all cases follow principles of effective design marked by document designers with a strong background of scholarship. The design is effective in its general layout, in which each line of text is set with adequate line spacing, providing enough white space to enable visual accessibility of all the information on the page (see Herrington 154-155). Since "characters with large x-heights [like those in the font choice use here] usually need greater line-to-line space than those with small x-heights" (Stopford 77), the designer provided adequate line spacing for the font used.

In addition, the document designer's choice to center all the material on the front cover within all margins, both side-to-side and top to bottom is effective since there are only 6 lines of important information and this amount of text is still visually clear in centered format. The designer also uses bold and large type sizes appropriately to highlight the candidate's name, his party, and the office for which he is running (see Herrington 154-55).

The layout of the flyer could be improved, however, with the removal of underlining that obscures text and makes it more difficult to read, and by using Times Roman or another conservative serif font in place of the Courier font that is located in the center of the front cover. Serif fonts are easier to read than san serif fonts (Craig 31, 123) and are also generally considered more conservative. Arguably, the designer could replace the less conservative Helvetica font with a strong serif font; but today as readers are becoming more accustomed to reading san serif fonts, Helvetica is nevertheless acceptable.

The document layout on the back cover of the Apple flyer is much less effective than the front, hindering the connotation of quality (see figure 2).

figure 2

Although the designer's use of one font on the back cover rather than three, as in the front cover, is an improvement in design, the choice of setting all the text on the back cover in italics makes it ineffective. Although very limited use of italics can add a sense of quality, where, like script fonts, they connote elegance, large blocks of text set in italics are difficult to read and generally not considered a good design choice. The designer also failed to make full use of the space on the back cover, leaving one third of the page blank while forcing a large amount of text into a smaller space. This makes the text more difficult to read and indicates a less professional design, thus, a lower quality document. On a more positive note, however, the designer's effective use of bold to highlight the candidate's name, the name of his party, and his most important supporter, Grigory Yablinsky, helps to counteract some of the design mistakes in the back cover.

Analysis of Substance in the Apple Flyer

The visual rhetoric of substance that indicates presence or lack of credibility in documents sometimes overlap those of quality. In the Apple flyer, the material, tangible qualities of heavy, textured, large-sized card stock create a sense of substantiality in the flyer that help to lead readers to perceive it as credible. The use of bolded fonts also add visual substantiality that indicates strength, as does the centered layout of text on the front cover.

But despite its strengths in visual rhetoric that indicate quality, the Apple flyer's inadequacies in substance destroy much of the sense of credibility with which the flyer is otherwise imbued. The back cover of the flyer contains important text explaining Peter Borisovich Shelish's accomplishments, positions on issues, and endorsements. Even though this substantive information is prominently displayed in adequately sized, appropriately conservative serif type, the text is hardly legible because is set in a block of italics. In addition, this important material listing accomplishments and thoughts that represent the candidate fails to fill the space on the page, creating a visual perception of insufficiency rather than substance. Both of these failures of document design create a visual rhetoric that degrades the flyer's credibility.

The attribute of the document that is the single most destructive to its overall credibility, however, is inherent in its internal pages, which I have not yet mentioned. The two full pages in the inside of the document are completely blank. This state of nothingness, of course, indicates a total lack of substance that nearly destroys the credibility that is supported in the positive attributes in the remainder of the flyer. Not only does the emptiness in the midst of the document suggest an emptiness in the candidate, it also indicates a wastefulness that is offensive to constituents who must look to their political leaders for answers to the difficult economic problems that Russia has experienced since the fall of the economy in April 1999. The lack of materiality in the midst of the document has the potential to turn the whole basis of credibility gained by its expensive heavy weight card stock, textured paper, and professionally developed print against the candidate's goals by focusing the readers' attention on how expensive it must have been to produce nothing of real substance. This concept ironically mirrors a state of political awareness with which Russian voters have long been weary.

Conclusion

The unfortunate design of Shelish's political flyer makes a statement that he certainly did not intend and that does not necessarily reflect the state of his platform, campaign, or his activities. Nevertheless, the visual rhetoric in the document's design has the capacity to speak to readers just as strongly as the linguistic material does. The Apple flyer is a signpost to visual rhetoricians that cautions them to design carefully and intelligently, noting the effect of their work. Document designers would be well advised to heed its warning.

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