Visual Vestiges

Name: Visual Vestiges
Price: 253.22 AUD
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ISBN: 9798855805963

Time, Rhetoric, and Information Design

Charles Kostelnick (Iowa State University)

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Hardback

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English

State University of New York Press
01 March 2026

Electronic, holographic & video art; Illustration & commercial art; Business communication & presentation

Series: SUNY series, Studies in Technical Communication

Visual Vestiges explains how information design evolved over the centuries to make practical information clear, credible, and emotionally engaging.

In Visual Vestiges Charles Kostelnick analyzes the role of the past in understanding, studying, deploying, and teaching visual language in business, technical, and professional communication. He explores how information designs—text, pictures, icons, charts, and graphs—evolved to develop their rhetorical power and the many ways in which their vestigial forms permeate contemporary design. To explain these temporal dynamics, he examines the forces that underpin them: cultural shifts in aesthetics, taste, and values; social changes that redefine how we relate to one another rhetorically; and innovations in technology that transform the tools and channels we use to visualize and interpret information. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, art history, and historical and contemporary examples, Kostelnick explores the rhetorical role of time in bridging past and present design forms—by constantly regenerating them through visual conventions, by heightening pathos appeals through sentiment and nostalgia, and by bolstering ethos, amplifying epideictic displays, and narrating stories with text, pictures, and charts.

By: Charles Kostelnick (Iowa State University)
Imprint: State University of New York Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 26mm
Weight: 612g
ISBN: 9798855805963
Series: SUNY series, Studies in Technical Communication
Pages: 366
Publication Date: 01 March 2026
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Charles Kostelnick is a Professor at Iowa State University. He is the author of Humanizing Visual Design: The Rhetoric of Human Forms in Practical Communication and coauthor, with Michael Hassett, of Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions.

Reviews for Visual Vestiges: Time, Rhetoric, and Information Design

""Visual Vestiges provides practical illustrations of visual rhetoric's temporal aspects and discussion of how the subject has changed historically. It also offers productive teaching suggestions to guide faculty and their students in the study of visual rhetoric's history and application."" — Jeremy Tirrell, University of North Carolina, Wilmington ""Visual Vestiges provides a unique angle into the study of visual design by proposing that history and rhetorical strategies are intertwined factors that affect existing design conventions. The author is a respected scholar in visual rhetoric and document design. Their work deeply engages major theories and key literature to establish an argument for a focus on time (or temporal factors) as an active agent that creates, shapes, stabilizes, destabilizes, and changes design practices. The interplay with classical rhetoric is profound."" — Jason Tham, Texas Tech University