AN EFFECTIVENESS MEASURE FOR VISUAL COMMUNICATION MEDIA: TOWARD DEFINITION OF VISUAL PRINCIPLES

Visual media can be vital tools for communication. Their vitality stems from universal validity and expanding accessibility. For their potential to be fully realized, however, standards for media effectiveness are critical.;This dissertation argues that standards for the quality of visual media can be precisely defined through mathematical modeling. This theoretical definition combines practical insights from visual design with evaluation techniques from systems engineering and social science to yield exemplars for visual displays. These criteria are called Visual Principles.;Visual Principles are standards for media effectiveness. They incorporate both parameters, operationalized in this investigation as form variables, and the structural organization among these parameters, analyzed through multidimensional scaling of variable stimuli. Additional tests discover optimal levels for some variables through causal links with viewer preference. In short, this study proposes a mathematical model that describes cognitively relevant parameters optimized for viewer preference as a standard for visual media effectiveness.;The theory for Visual Principles is explored through four empirical tests: A PRETEST to assess descriptive stimuli for variables; a MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS to discover functional relationships among these descriptors; and two VISUAL FORM PREFERENCE TESTS to find optimal levels for some of thes parameters.;This study integrates concepts about visual communication from the diverse fields of design theory, communication systems engineering, and human communication research. The resulting descriptive theory and its evaluative tests are offered as a preliminary foundation of basic research necessary for a science of visual media effectiveness.;Test methodology includes metric multidimensional analysis of ratio scaled subject judgements for graphic pair comparison stimuli and regression analysis for causal models linking viewer preference with visual form variables and other viewer factors. Stimuli for visual form variables were abstract graphic displays. Some time varying variables were illustrated through unique videotape stimuli.;A spatial map of cognitive organization for nine variable descriptors is presented and discussed. Other analyses find a positive, curvilinear functional relationship between viewer preference and one form variable, static complexity.