Abstract

The concept of resonance can be used to contribute understanding to how visual design can trigger a connection with readers and prolong their experience of a visual text. While resonance in visual design is credited with amplifying intended meaning and urging an interpretive effort on a visual reader’s part, there is little that explores how resonance might direct or prolong one’s attention in the observation and interpretation of a visual text. Experiments by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) in the perception of tone and phenomena of sympathetic vibration in acoustics contribute further to an interpretation of resonance for visual design. Resonance can be considered as a selective filter that directs a person’s attention, bringing focus to something that due to overall complexity within a given context, may otherwise not be noticed. This paper uses diagrams to explain concepts of resonance for visual design and draws on Michel de Certeau’s ideas of strategies, tactics and trajectories. Resonance is interpreted as dynamic and cooperational; readers reappropriate imposed systems and structures that they move in amongst, actively yet silently participating in a multiplicity of relations in the act of observing, interpreting and understanding their surroundings.