Madeline Zomb's Visual Rhetoric Blog

I met with Professor deWinter to receive feedback on ways in which I could improve my comic so that it was easier to follow and connect to the audience. She suggested that I use ethos by showing at least two characters sending memes back and forth on their phones like modern day people do. I had trouble envisioning this in a comic at first, but after playing around with even more memes and sending texts to myself, this is what I came up with: I redrew the stick figures with a sharpie by hand instead of on the computer which added a really cool effect to the comic. The comic also flows as a conversation and for my audience who are first year students at WPI, they would find this easy to follow because the majority of them communicate by texting all the time. I also threw in some references such as the 'B' and the "look at all those chickens" famous vine to add in humor and better connect with my audience. By giving my character a sassy sense of humor, this also cre...

Artist Statement: We were assigned to create a map of ‘something’ in Worcester. Immediately, we were tempted to make a map that was a technical tool for people to use to traverse through an area to get from point A to B, but after learning about the use of conditional rhetoric used in maps, we recognized our power as cartographers to create a map that acted persuasively. We decided to create a map of off-campus apartment options around WPI. “Off-Campus Apartments Around WPI” is a map that shows the price ranges of off campus apartments in WPI’s surrounding area, as well as the how many students live off campus in the surrounding areas. We modeled our map after heat maps, a genre of map that viewers would be familiar with.We chose bright colors to represent each of our price ranges, similar to how heat maps use neons to denote different temperature ranges. We used a muted grey for the areas that were not occupied by WPI students so that the densely populated areas would stand out, ...

I met with Caroline today and we focused on ways we could reinterpret the points we had plotted on the map. We were inspired by the look of a heat map and the ways in which the points of are shown as seen below. We wanted to show the trends in pricing of apartments by doing something similar with our points. We first imported our map into photoshop and using different layers for each color, plotted our points using glowing colors indicating pricing. One of the main points of criticism we received in class was that our colors made more expensive apartments look 'bad' because of the intense red we used. By changing our color scheme, there isn't a sense of good or bad, but rather to show a difference in pricing. We also needed to think of ways to effectively utilize the negative space of the map and clearly show where key locations such as WPI and Becker are located in relation to the housing. This is what we came up with. We decided to create lines going down each stree...

We're creating a map for our last unit project in WR 2310! Caroline and I are working together and decided to create a map showing the costing of renting off campus apartments. We began by visiting the most used website for this, jumpoffcampus.com - this has listings of all available apartments. We took a screenshot of the map and used this to start plotting points. We then sent out a google form asking where people live and how much they (individually) pay per month to get more data for our map and we received nearly 70 responses! Caroline and I split up plotting these points by putting them into an excel sheet to organize the responses and then plotted them on the map. We expected to see a trend with the colors we used to indicate prices but this is what we saw instead: Our next step was to figure out a way to reinterpret this map to create something with more of a purpose.

I changed some elements of the comic to make it easier to read and create a better flow. Here is the final: This is difficult to read so here is a link to the google slide:   https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uITEf8XL3aAHBc6KIIendmPEFGyr4DxPZ3SNShVJdL0/edit?usp=sharing Our audience is WPI first year students who may be confused or thrown off by the humanities requirement. This comic simplifies this and is something freshmen would find accessible and amusing rather than the traditional way of presenting the humanities requirement which can be confusing. The blend of funny memes and pictures, met with minimal text written in Comic Sans and Impact (the traditional meme font) makes this an entertaining and engaging quick read. The main character's reactions and thoughts throughout the comic are 'relatable' and because of this uses ethos to grab the reader's attention. We kept the character a very simple stick figure so that everyone would be able to relate t...

After struggling to come up with an engaging way to present the "Road to HUA" in a comic, I decided to brainstorm a completely new idea. With the deadline approaching rapidly, this was a risky move, but I wanted something that would be very eye catching and intriguing to first year students to learn about the humanities requirement. After sketching a few different ideas, it finally clicked: memes . Students spend an average of 24 hours per day looking at memes, so this was the perfect way to communicate important information to them. I spent a lot of time outlining this new comic idea and along the way I chose memes that would entertain students as they read how to complete their HUA requirement through depth and breadth, as well as why it is so important and valuable to their experience at WPI. Here are some of my sketches and brainstorming ideas: After sketching out the comic, I decided to create it using powerpoint: The combination of stick figures w...