A language for visuals: Design, purpose, usability

Information economy, indeed any economy, requires some common medium of exchange. We therefore seek clarity and commonality in the vocabulary of visual language. Visual vocabularies have of course been proposed by others, but we can demonstrate that, so far, they possess an artificiality effectively preventing widespread adoption. Therefore, what we propose is a comprehensive language for visuals that is derived from terms and concepts already extant in the visual rhetoric literature, but with a novel, unifying organization which, we will demonstrate, is organically grammatical in the precise sense of the word. Our goal is not to silence other language scholars who interpret visuals in their own ways but rather to offer up a safe space where, theories and ideologies and egos aside, we can collectively name what we collectively experience in visual information, then as technical communicators read and create visuals with a fuller understanding of how visuals work in relation to and separate from textual interpretation.