Giorgia Aiello

National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry

In this article we examine 561 different airline tailfin designs as a visual genre, revealing how the global-local binary may be managed and realized semiotically. Our analysis is organized into three strands: (a) a descriptive analysis identifies the strikingly restricted visual lexicon and dominant corporate aesthetic established by tailfin design; (b) an interpretive analysis considers the communicative strategies at play and the meaning potentials which underpin different visual resources; (c) a critical analysis links these decisions of design and branding to the political and cultural economies of globalism and the airline industry. Specifically, we show how airlines are able to service national identity concerns through the use of highly localized visual meanings while also appealing to the meaning systems of the international market in their pursuit of symbolic and economic capital. One key semiotic resource is the balancing of cultural symbolism and perceptual iconicity in the form of abstracted stylizations of kinetic effects. Although positioned unfairly in the global semioscape, airlines may resist straightforward cultural homogenization by strategically reworking existing design structures and exploiting possibly universal semiotic meaning potentials.

Symbolic Capitals: Visual Discourse and Intercultural Exchange in the European Capital of Culture Scheme.

In multilingual Europe, visual discourse may function as a cross-culturally strategic form of communication, thanks in part to its perceptual and iconic availability. In this regard, we offer a social semiotic critique of a range of visual resources deployed in he official promotional texts of 30 of the 43 cities either nominated or competing for he title of European Capital of Culture between 2005 and 2011. In considering the political/cultural/economic ideologies that underpin the production of a supposedly an-European identity, we also show how these branding exercises manage local/global tensions by exploiting the intercultural meaning potentials of visual discourse.

The work that visualisation conventions do

ABSTRACT This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers’ belief that through visualisation, it is possible to ‘do good with data’ [Periscopic. 2014. Home page. Retrieved from http://www.periscopic.com/]. We focus on four conventions which imbue visualisations with a sense of objectivity, transparency and facticity. These include: (a) two-dimensional viewpoints; (b) clean layouts; (c) geometric shapes and lines; (d) the inclusion of data sources. We argue that thinking about visualisations from a social semiotic standpoint, as we do in this paper by bringing together what visualisation designers say about their intentions with a semiotic analysis of the visualisations they produce, advances understanding of the ways that data visualisations come into being, how they are imbued with particular qualities and how power operates in and through them. Thus, this paper contributes nuanced understanding of data visualisations and their production, by uncovering the ways in which power is at work within them. In turn, it advances debate about data in society and the emerging field of data studies.

The 'Other' Europeans: The Semiotic Imperative of Style in Euro Visions by Magnum Photos

In this article, the author examines Euro Visions, the exhibition created by Magnum Photos to portray the new countries that joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007. She begins by observing that this project’s deviations from the world-leading agency’s trademark humanist style of photography were discursively ascribed to Euro Visions photographers’ authorial style. In this regard, she identifies two key semiotic resources – typing and juxtaposition – that were mobilized as markers of individual style. She then argues that both typing and juxtaposition should instead be seen as generic semiotic resources rooted in corporate styles of visual communication, which contribute to othering the ‘new’ Europeans. She also argues that in Euro Visions, the notion of ‘distinctive’ authorial style was deployed as symbolic currency for a global(ist) market that rewards cultural production and, broadly, aestheticization. She finally posits that, in projects like Euro Visions, what is mostly (generic) design may get passed off as (specific) representation, and that this aestheticization of styles and identities may be mystified as the substantial honouring of difference and diversity.

From Wound to Enclave: The Visual-Material Performance of Urban Renewal in Bologna's Manifattura delle Arti

In this article I examine the visual-material performance of urban renewal in Bolognas cultural district Manifattura delle Arti. Through an evaluation of its physical characteristics and with the aid of personal narrative, I elucidate that the district performs meaning potentials of exclusion and distinction. Not unlike when it was a run-down former industrial area, the district visibly interrupts the cityscape. In doing so, it is now constituted as an enclave for the global(ist) communication of Bologna. Rather than being an organically integrated or politically disruptive presence, this urban enclave ultimately contributes to the deepening of inequalities that are typical of advanced capitalism.

Beyond authenticity: A visual-material analysis of locality in the global redesign of Starbucks stores

In this article, the authors examine the global store design strategy launched by Starbucks in 2009 in the wake of the economic crisis, increasing brand dilution, and growing competition. They offer a visual-material analysis of the corporation’s efforts to create a global aesthetic grounded in locality, with an in-depth focus on meaning potentials of materiality and community found across the four store redesigns that were unveiled in Seattle, the coffee company’s hometown, and which functioned as prototypes for store design across the United States, Europe and Asia. They then critically engage Starbucks’ rhetoric/discourse of locality in relation to the more widespread notion of authenticity and argue that, while authenticity is rooted in textual and symbolic arrangements, locality operates in the realm of emplaced and embodied claims of difference. Shifting from authenticity to locality in design and branding practices alters critical engagements and everyday relationships with global consumer capitalism, insofar as this may be increasingly entrenched with vernacular expressions of cosmopolitanism.

Here, and Not Yet Here: A Dialogue at the Intersection of Queer, Trans, and Culture

Abstract To start this dialogue, guest editor Karma R. Chávez posed a series of general and unbinding questions to participants about the meanings of queer theory and its relationship with questions of culture. The dialogue unfolded over the course of three weeks in an online forum and covered several important themes. First, participants engaged questions surrounding the meaning of queer, and its relationship to different cultural and linguistic contexts, especially with regard to diaspora, settler colonialism, and postcoloniality. Second, participants considered the interplay between queer and trans theories, which led to considerations of the body, memory, and homonormativity. Third, after the “coming out” of the U.S. actress Jodie Foster, participants had a lively discussion about the politics of visibility, responsibility, and accountability for different LGBTQ subjects. The dialogue concluded with final meditations.

Seattle's Pike Place Market (De)constructed: An Analysis of Tourist Narratives about a Public Space

This paper is a critical analysis of the narrative construction of Seattle’s well-known and heavily touristed Pike Place Market. The analysed data come from both institutional and amateur sources, including travel guides and photographs taken by tourists at the market. Tourist literature provides narrative themes in the form of literary descriptions and photographic images, that emphasise and reveal only certain textual dimensions of a place. Tourists’ experiences and accounts are inevitably informed by such themes. In addition, studying tourist photography is an excellent way to understand how people actively use and resist modes of representation that are derived from institutional sources. Tourists are usually remarkably prolific photographers, while also being exposed to a great number and variety of institutional narratives of the sites they visit. Public space is not merely a geographical configuration, but also a verbal and visual narrative construction by means of technologies such as writing and photography. The construction of a narrative via the means of technology can be political both in the way that it is produced and in the way it is consumed. The authors examine the dynamic power relationship that exists between institutional and amateur texts about popular public spaces, such as a city’s public market.

All Tögethé® now: the recontextualization of branding and the stylization of diversity in EU public communication

This article examines the EU Birthday Logo Competition, which was launched jointly by the major European Union (EU) institutions to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in 2007. As the first public communication initiative by the European Commissions newly restructured Directorate General for Communication, the logo competition is a particularly rich micro-textual “site” for a critical investigation of the recontextualization of corporate communication discourses and practices into institutional approaches to the communication of EU identity. Through an analysis of policy documents, on-site observations, textual artifacts, and in-depth interviews with policy-makers and design professionals I argue that the tensions and challenges that characterized the EU Birthday Logo Competition and related EU communication policy as a site of recontextualization may have led to the communication of a much more stylized, rather than complex and nuanced, version of European identity. In particular, I argue that the dialectic between the “professional/corporate” and “institutional/political” cultures that interacted in the selection, production and implementation of the anniversary logo may have contributed to obscuring key principles of corporate branding at work in the design, and may have in fact worked to produce a highly generic, decontextualized and ultimately also bland, although certainly problematic, “vision” of EU diversity.

Special Issue: Difference and Globalization

Our original aspiration for this special issue was to attract a broad base of visual communication scholars working on the nexus of difference and globalization, with the aim of defining the substance and assessing the significance of this particular dialectic in our field. While globalization does entail the ever-growing significance of deterritorialized practices and transcultural flows, these connections, movements and exchanges still largely occur across specific locales and identities, and through appeals to various dimensions of cultural and social difference. Purposefully comprehensive in scope, our call for papers led to over 70 proposals that tackled the relationship between globalization and race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and religion in visual communication from a number of theoretical angles, including but not limited to diasporic, queer, postcolonial, feminist and intercultural perspectives.Taken together, the seven contributions included in this special issue address questions related to the integration and deployment of major dimensions of social and cultural difference in visual communication materials; the perspectives and practices of designers, image-makers and media producers in relation to the work involved in the planning and creation of such materials; and both the dominant ways of seeing and unique experiences that impact on the visual ‘reading’ of globalization. A combination of well-known and emerging scholars makes for an unusually energetic take on concepts and concerns that underlie several of the major frameworks that have become established in the inherently interdisciplinary field of visual communication, including multimodal and critical discourse analysis, social semiotics, rhetorical criticism, visual anthropology and visual sociology.