Three Fundamental Elements of Visual Rhetoric in Hypertext

The design of information on the printed page or on the computer screen must express the overall structure of that information in order to be understood by the reader. Various conventions of typography communicate the meta-structure of a block of text such as size of type, weight of font, use of indents, initial capitals (derived from illuminated capitals in the manuscript tradition), use of bold and italic variations, and use of color. Analogous conventions exist in information graphics for communicating quantitative information, visual narrative such as instructions, and location graphics such as maps.