Visualizing Culture

In an increasingly global society, the ability to identify a culture’s visual aesthetics helps us localize messages for better understanding and resonance with targeted audiences. But how do we identify the visual cues that specific cultures respond to? Based on Web design «best practices» and data collected from close to 2000 websites in more than 30 countries over a period of eight years, this book defines a methodology for identifying patterns – a «pattern language» – by which one can analyze the cultural aesthetics of a website to: (1) learn more about the visual communication patterns of a particular culture, (2) apply what is learned to the creation of new Web communication, and (3) identify trends in visual communication on the Web as influenced by emerging technologies.

Roxanne O’Connell (PhD, Salve Regina University) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Graphic Design at Roger Williams University. She is the editor of the two-volume series Teaching with Multimedia and a contributing author to Visualizing the Web: Evaluating Online Design from a Visual Communication Perspective.