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research has characterised three key relationships among prose and pictures:
redundant, complementary and supplementary. To these three I add two more:
juxtapositional and stage-setting. Let’s look at each briefly and then in more
detail
- · Redundant – characterised by substantial identical content appearing visually and verbally, in which each mode tells the same story, providing repetition of key ideas.
- · Complementary - characterised by different content visually and verbally, in which both modes are needed in order to understand the key ideas.
- · Supplementary – characterised by different content in words and pictures, in which one mode dominates the other, providing the main ideas, while the other reinforces, elaborates or instantiates the points made in the dominate mode (or explains how to interpret the other).
- · Juxtapositional – characterised by different content in words and pictures, in which the key ideas are created by a clash or a semantic tension between the ideas in each model the idea cannot be inferred without both modes being presented simultaneously.
- · Stage-Setting – characterised by different content in words and pictures, in which one mode (often the visual) forecasts the content, underlying theme, or ideas presented in the other mode.
These do
not necessarily constitute a complete set of all the relationships readers may
experience or that document designers may want to establish. Further, in some
cases a prose and graphics combination may fall on the boundary of two
categories. This set simply represents some of the more common ways words and
pictures work together.
Reference: Karen A. Schriver, 1997, Dynamics in document
design: creating texts for readers,
Wiley Computer Pub
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