Visual Rhetoric, Ads, and the Society’s Radiograph
Visual Rhetoric, Ads, and the Society’s Radiograph

Summary/Abstract: The visual elements that belong to a brand’s identity represent more than just a simple illustration of a designer’s vision. They communicate messages, they structure and present profound data to the public about that certain brand (product, company, institution , etc.), but also about the society in general. Through this paper, we propose to make an analysis of the visual language used by some companies on the Romanian market, in different time frames: the interwar period, the World War II period, and the communist and post-communist periods. The research undertaking shall take shape through the “parsing” of the ads present in magazines issued in the periods subjected to the analysis. The visual rhetoric, as a means of reading images, will guide us in discovering the way a brand’s personality is conceived, as well as the way in which the society as a whole is X-rayed, through the decipherment of this communication unit. Our study is an attempt of mapping the Romanian society, underlining the ideological changes, from an advertising perspective.

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