I began studying visual communication as a linguist concerned with the discourses, genres and styles of media texts, 20 years ago. It had become increasingly obvious to me that it was no longer adequate to study just the linguistic aspects of these texts, and that the paradigms for studying images in media studies concentrated only on the connotative meanings of the people, places and things in images, and neglected the role of composition and layout as structuring devices, as a kind of 'grammar' for both images and many kinds contemporary written texts. This work resulted in Reading Images - The Grammar of Visual Design (1996), a book which I co-wrote with Gunther Kress, and which has now begun to find its place, particularly in areas such as critical discourse analysis and the analysis of educational materials. However, this work did not touch at all on typography, and it is only in the last few years that I have come to realize what a fundamental oversight this was, because clearly, it is above all and in the first place through calligraphy and typography that visual communication and writing form an inseparable unity.
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