A semiotic perspective on aesthetic preferences, visual literacy, and information design

To indicate that the world ‘out’ there’ is what we, as humans, conceive it to be, and not as it is in and for itself, I will consider the image-making process as a process of visual modeling of concepts. As such, visual modeling is equivalent to the meaning-making process, since a graphic model is the conceptual model of structural and conceptual relations. I will discuss functional differences between images and diagrams, as categories fulfilling different expectations, the former being tools of art-making, and the latter being tools of information design. In order to facilitate the goal of advancing the level of visual literacy, I will examine the factors contributing to the shaping of the boundaries of visual literacy and aesthetic preferences. In doing so, I will relate the evolutionary process of form development to the development of its semantic dimension, using examples from the art of children. I argue that the rules of constructing images at the early stages of form development are identical with the rules of designing diagrams.