Images That Work

Oller and Giardetti provide a simple, comprehensive, and fully consistent theory to explain why some messages and images communicate more effectively than others — and then show specialists in advertising, marketing, and high stake communications how to apply the theory in their work. With examples and illustrations that practitioners and academics alike will find understandable, they provide readers with a solid grounding in semiotics, the study of how meanings are constructed and construed in signs. In doing so Oller and Giardetti help high stakes communicators find new ways to reach and persuade others — but speak against deceit and subterfuge. They make clear that messages must be consistent with the facts, and that the most successful communicators share one special trait: integrity. A readable, research-based, up-to-date treatment of an important emerging field of study, and a carefully developed guide for practitioners and academics alike. Images That Work is about emotions, desires, ideas, and the hard objects, events, and tensional relations in the common world of space and time. It is about creating and presenting words and pictures in ways that communicate genuine substance from real people to other real people. Oller and Giardetti begin with the foundations of integrity, the glory of supreme effort, and the weaknesses of fads, fashions, and untested gut feelings. They draw examples from high stakes messages in advertising, entertainment, and other communications industries. In doing so they make clear that not only are effective messages consistent with material facts, they are also comprehensive in how they convey facts and yet concise and simple enough to fit into the time and space that consumers will devote to the message. And along the way they give readers a solid grounding in the fascinating and relatively new field of semiotics, a field that has already become well established in the academic community and which has begun to spread its influence to the world outside.

JOHN W. OLLER, JR. is Professor and Head of the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Director, Doris B. Hawthorne Center for Special Education and Communicative Disorders, Lafayette, Louisiana./e He is author of 12 books and more than 200 published articles and an elected member of the New York Academy of Sciences. J. ROLAND GIARDETTI teaches at Simpson College, Redding, California, and has published on research in visual literacy./e Previously, he was a personnel director and a professor of photography, and he is currently at work on a book about how to succeed in graduate studies.