Visual Well-being: Intersections of Rhetorical Theory and Visual Design

This paper demonstrates that where rhetorical theory intersects with visual design studies, it creates opportunities for invention and generates analytic power to illuminate meanings and evaluate visual phenomenon. Particularly, rhetorical theory provides historical concepts and constructs—such as enargeia and eudemonia—that speak to the realm of visual practices in unique and important ways, and enable critics to explore transcendent and universalistic assumptions about aesthetics and human wellbeing within the limits of situated human experience and creativity. A survey of literature in design and rhetoric results in the development of an overarching critical framework referred to as visual wellbeing. The framework is applied to analysis of several different types of visual design projects to illustrate its critical and practical potential.