Note that I have not discussed the size or placement of
the photograph on the Web page. Although such features—as
well as the relationship of the image to other elements of the
page, both printed and online—can have a significant impact
on visual language, they are part of page design, an aspect of
visual communication not covered in this article. To help
readers focus on the content of images analyzed here, most of
the images I use in this article are excerpted from Web pages.
Professional communicators should be aware that visual
social semiotics may not be able to answer all the
issues that an image may raise. For example, 10 different
creators could be given the same image to produce and
would do so in 10 different ways, creating different effects
through aesthetics and style—effects that are not addressed
through this particular framework. Nor can visual
social semiotics help in understanding the rhetorical role
that text itself plays as a graphical image through color,
typography, and placement. (See Schriver 1997 for a discussion
of how people “see” text.) However, as I hope the
discussion of the photograph of the U.S. Supreme Court
demonstrates, visual social semiotics can be an extremely
useful tool for analyzing images and their relationship to text.