The use of color on websites can make it hard to read.
The use of images can sometimes not show what you meant to emphasize.
Using clip art doesn’t show much creativeness and often is so generic that is seems lazy. Often many people have the same clip art and are not impress by your selection.
Illustrations and Diagrams can make or break a design. They can sometimes be unclear so always think about what would convey the information with the most clarity.
Graphs-Everyone likes pie charts but they are only good for showing parts of a whole. Bar graphs are help for a variety of numeric variables even over time. Line graphs are great but too many lines can be confusing.
Photograhpy- is always popular but manipulating it can cause distortions. Copyright becomes an issue because many people beginners tend to just upload the first image they come across. Sometimes removing items from a picture to make it more clear is not really showing what is true. Often times compressing and can distort the picture.

Overall Design
All factors have to come together. Certain fonts don’t work with certain colors.

Across the Disciplines is the result of a merger between two peer-reviewed, academic journals: Language and Learning Across the Disciplines and Academic.Writing. The mission of Academic.Writing, an online journal that was published from 2000 through 2003, was to provide information for – and an opportunity for interaction among – scholars interested in writing, speaking, and otherwise communicating across the curriculum (CAC). Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, a print journal published from 1994 to 2003, was a more traditional journal that focused on writing in the disciplines. In late 2002, when Academic.Writing shifted from being the “container” for the WAC Clearinghouse and became, instead, one of the publications available on the newer WAC Clearinghouse Web site, the scope of the journal shifted from a repository of all forms of information about communication across the curriculum to a more standard academic journal.

Like Language and Learning Across the Disciplines, Across the Disciplines provides CAC researchers, program designers, and teachers interested in using communication assignments and activities in their courses with a venue for scholarly debate about issues of disciplinarity and writing across the curriculum. ATD also preserves the broader commitment to cross-disciplinary emphases in writing studies that characterized Academic.Writing. As was the case with Academic.Writing, ATD eschews the conventional volume/issue format of print and many online journals. Instead, ATD will continue to function as an evolving, growing document (or, more accurately, a collection of documents) on the Web. As such, articles and other materials will be published as they are accepted. At regular intervals, we will make announcements about new materials in the journal.

http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/about.cfm

“Visual communication involves understanding a wide variety of activities central both to the perception of messages as well as to the construction of them. Serious study of the world of visuals, like the study of literature, music, and other forms of art, can contribute to the student’s understanding of the world of human expression. In
general terms, the primary goal of this course is to develop habits of analysis and criticism as well as techniques of mass media message development in order to better understand the contributions of visual media to human communication.”

http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/vcsyllabus.html

According to Mitchell, “ekphrastic fear is the moment of resistance or counter desire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually.” Mitchell leads readers through specific discussions of Williams, Keats, Stevens and especially Shelley, reading the manuscript poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” into his argument. Of this poem he says, “If ekphrasis, as a verbal representation of a visual representation, is an attempt to repress or ‘take dominion’ over language’s graphic Other, then Shelley’s Medusa is the return of that repressed image, teasing us out of thought with a vengeance.” In discussing this poem Mitchell argues that gender is one among many figures of difference that energize the dialectic of the imagetext. Mitchell (like Murray Krieger) suggest that ekphrastic digressions aim to be all of literature in miniature. Mitchell thinks that ekphrasis is “one of the keys to difference within language (both ordinary and literary) and that it focuses the interarticulation of perceptual, semiotic, and social contradictions within verbal representation.” (Jean Jacobson.)

http://mh.cla.umn.edu/txtimjj6.html

“Visual culture studies and visual rhetoric have been increasing areas of emphasis in scholarly studies. Drawing on the work of a variety of theorists, from Kenneth Burke in rhetorical studies to Roland Barthes in semiotics, and addressing a wide range of subjects, from supermarkets to new media, scholars established visual cultural studies as a thriving and significant area of inquiry for the new century. The impetus for such study has been the awareness that Americans’ primary information sources (television and the World Wide Web) are strongly graphic (or visual) rather than print- or text-based in nature. This series will encourage scholars working in rhetoric, cultural studies, and communication to create new scholarly works that analyze visual phenomena. The intent is to assist in the development of a dedicated publication venue for visual rhetorical studies in order to establish coherence in what is currently a disparate discipline.

“The previously unquestioned hegemony of verbal text is being challenged by what W. J. T. Mitchell labels the “pictorial turn” (Picture Theory)-a recognition of the importance and ubiquity of images in the dissemination and reception of information, ideas, and opinions-processes that lie at the heart of all rhetorical practices, social movements, and cultural institutions. In the past decade, many scholars have called for collaborative ventures, in essence for disciplining of the study of visual information into a new field, variously labeled visual rhetoric, visual culture studies, or “image studies.” This proposed new field would bring together the work currently being accomplished by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including art theory, anthropology, rhetoric, cultural studies, psychology, and media studies.”

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=133249

http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/454/visrhetbib.html

The very existence of a visual language gives rise to the concept of visual rhetoric. As its spoken counterpart does, visual rhetoric has its own figures and its own way of using them. by Juan C. Dürsteler

http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?lang=2&num=121

When the printing press was invented by Gutenberg in the 1440s, this created an entire new medium for visual rhetoric. All the spoken rhetoric made popular by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian could now be written down, printed, and merged with the visual communication of symbols. Both forms of visual rhetoric have continued into the present. Printed books, essays, letters, signs, and anything else you can think of that contains language and can be used to influence or convey an idea is rhetoric. Even the fonts they are printed in send a message. Paintings, drawings, comics, photos, and computer images are forms of rhetoric as well. In the 20th century, using images as propaganda became popular. During World War I, posters were used to encourage enlistment in the army and to sell war bonds. This trend has continued with every war and political movement since then. With the invention of the internet, the use of visual propaganda has soared to a completely different level. There is no limit to what can be projected onto a computer screen and how it can or will be used to influence whoever views it. The interesting thing about visual rhetoric is that, when new forms of visual communication are introduced, the others do not die out. Even though we don’t currently draw on cave walls, the invention of the alphabet did not make symbolic drawings obsolete, and the printing press has not stopped anyone from hand-writing altogether. We still have drawings, paintings, script, font, photographs, and now computers, and as we move forward with new technology, the visual world of communication will extend even further.

sources:http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761578676/Paleolithic_Art.html
http://www.citrinitas.com/history_of_viscom/rockandcaves.html
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761565349/Alphabet.html#p4
http://www.citrinitas.com/history_of_viscom/ideograms.html
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761574514/Rhetoric.html
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761578946/Posters.html#p10

If you would like to read the rest of this article, you can locate it at: http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_2/miltner/index.html

“In every crisis, Scarlett returns to Tara, regardless of the risks involved (after the Battle of Atlanta, for example). As the film ends, her final realization is that she must return to her home, her agrarian roots. That Scarlett views Rhett’s departure as a tragedy encapsulates the conflicts within her feminine identity previously discussed; that to her Tara promises relief, comfort, and a chance to think (even if it’s about the dubious cause of getting Rhett back) reverberates in audiences well trained in the agrarian myth; that a woman personifies characteristics and events consciously or unconsciously considered male, though, creates disorder within potential harmony.”

If you would like to read more of this article you can find it at: http://www.imagesjournal.com/2002/features/gwtw/

–Gerard A. Hauser: “Rhetoric is an instrumental use of language. One person engages another person in an exchange of symbols to accomplish some goal. It is not communication for communication’s sake. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention.”

I thought this one fitting because talks about using symbols to accomplish goals, which is what visual rhetoric does.

–George Kennedy: Rhetoric in the most general sense may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expanded in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message.

I thought this was a wonderful quote because you really have to put your energy into something to make it come alive and then the person who views has to use their own energy to dredge some type of meaning out of it.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricdefinitions.htm