http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/h/c/hcc114/guitar.gif∞ Read
McCloud Chapter 2 pages 24-59, "The Vocabulary of Comics."
Here,
"icon"∞ describes "any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea," and although
McCloud focuses mostly on comics, he also notices that writers regularly produce new symbols and iconography to achieve their rhetorical purposes. What icons do you encounter during your day, and what effect do you think they have on you? What effect did their designers intend?
IconExample
On page 49,
McCloud suggests that we can make icons ourselves by making pictures more like words and words more like pictures. This is a good way to work on developing a topic into an argument. For your next blog, find an image and make it into an icon by using it to respond to a classmates blog. For example:
IcecreamMan writes in his first wiki post that "My full name is Steven Garrett [Crowley], but people just call me Captain. I like pie. I’m a feisty fireball of interesting comments. I like to have a good time and I like to move-it move-it." Now I am going to images.google.com.....selecting...pasting:
http://www.mctague.org/carl/fun/pie/pie-face-2.jpg∞
Here I have decided that what essentially defines Steve is ironically not ice cream, but his tremendous love of pie. So I find an image that reminds us how important it is to give Steve a pie once in awhile. That image is now an icon of Steve, or at least I am trying to make it into one. So from now on, when you see
http://www.mctague.org/carl/fun/pie/pie-face-2.jpg∞
Think of my friend and student Steve.
Assignments
- Using Google Images∞, One Word Movie∞, and Gimp∞, choose an icon for yourself
- Post your icon to your blog (see FormattingRules for how to post images). If you need space to host your image, try http://imageshack.us∞
- Write a paragraph explaining the reasons you picked this image as your icon (including why you chose that image (beyond "I thought it was good (or pretty, or whatever)"), and what trait of yourself that image represents)
- Have all of this done by 11 AM on Monday
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