This article conceptualizes the field of ‘visual communication and mental health’, prioritizing the question of how visual imagery is experienced. Taking as its starting point the challenge of overcoming stigma and the limitations of visual clichés of depression and mental illness, the author argues for a dynamic, relational model of communications, foregrounding lived experience. To illuminate the psychosocial impacts and potential benefits of creative engagement with visual media, she draws on understandings of symbolic communication, derived in particular from the work of DW Winnicott and the British Independent tradition of psychoanalysis. The imagery discussed includes stock and campaign imagery, conceptual/expressive artwork and a virtual reality (VR) production that extends an innovative approach to mental health literacy by First Nations artists.

This visual essay utilizes a series of images from Make Do and Mend, a participatory workshop that brought together designers, a museum conservator and the general public to explore design for repair as part of Sydney Craft Week in 2019. The photographs capture objects and materials in various states of transformation, bringing to light the aesthetic politics at play that often underpin acts of repair. The essay is a visual re-framing of repair as a form of design practice, revealing objects in various states of transformation and our changing attitudes towards them over time. As a visual narrative, the essay demonstrates the value of material knowledge exchange in shaping new aesthetic registers for object conservation and approaches to repair.

Introduced in 1907, the ‘real photo’ postcard destabilized the boundaries between private and public life, enabling people to perform identity in ways that anticipate contemporary social media practices. In this visual essay, the author explores one particular phenomenon – the sharing of food – drawing comparisons with ‘foodstagramming’ in terms of its compositional structure, social objectives and communicative functions. In doing so, she challenges the supposed novelty of modes of self-presentation on social media, embedding them in a broader historical trajectory.

The visual communication of behavioural expectations plays an important role in the management of contemporary urban spaces. This is evident in mass transit settings where posters and signage promoting good mobility practices are a common sight. Despite the prevalence of such semiotic interventions in passenger conduct in public transport environments globally (see Bissell’s Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities, 2018; Moore’s ‘Preventing anti-social behaviour on public transport: An alternative route?’, 2010; and Ureta’s ‘Waiting for the barbarians: Disciplinary devices on Metro de Santiago, 2012), their visual structure has only received limited scholarly attention. This article seeks to address this oversight through a visual analysis of ‘manner posters’ issued by Japanese railway providers. Using a two-pronged content analysis approach, the author examines the design strategies employed to problematise passenger misconduct and solicit desirable mobility practices while simultaneously protecting customer sensibilities. Focusing on character figuration, image–viewer relations and the portrayal of misconduct, the article argues that manner posters inscribe behavioural expectations into the physical transport environment by modelling their narrative visual content after actual commuter experiences and using salience-increasing design techniques to highlight etiquette transgressions. As an in-depth visual analysis of transit manner posters, the article thus advances our understanding of the strategic use of visual communication for the management of everyday behaviour and the production and maintenance of public order in contemporary cities.

Design frameworks that outline the benefits of thinking in terms of binaries suggest that, as designers, we can situate ourselves and our work in relation to opposite extremes. Doing so is more likely to bring about innovation and imagine ideological possibilities. This Special Issue creates a binary between ugly and beautiful with a specific focus on the former. The standard dictionary definitions of ugly are in relation to an unpleasant or repulsive appearance or a topic that is likely to involve violence or other unpleasantries. We draw both definitions into our discussion. We have collected articles that have at their heart ugly topics, including the climate crisis, racism and digital surveillance, which reflect contemporary times. As we write, a war has begun in Ukraine. The news shifts the global pandemic to second position and shunts Black Lives Matter, the rising cost of living in the UK, widening social inequality and the climate crisis out of the news headline. Each news package is filled to the brim with infinite amounts of ugly information. We push for a rebellion against the convention of beautifying data, such as became mainstream following the popularity of Information Is Beautiful (McCandless, 2009) and other works emphasizing the sleek graphic design of data visualization. Instead, we seek to engage people in exploring how to research, analyse and present ugly information in other ways. We aim to encourage thinking beyond one mode and focus attention on the complex array of ways in which modes can meet and combine. We suggest that hybrid assemblages of digital and physical materials can reach audiences via their senses in new ways. We seek to encourage readers to find their own connections between modes, materials and senses in order to understand and communicate complex and particularly ugly issues in innovative ways. We shift our emphasis from visual communication towards experience and interaction. In other words, we try to bring about ugly information experiences, ones that more accurately reflect the profound crises of capital (Fisher, 2009), nature (Chase et al., 2020), and spirit (Danese et al., 2020) that characterize the present moment.

Influenced by the global neoliberalization of higher education, academic entrepreneurialism has become a new paradigm of university development and has brought about profound changes in various types of university discourse. Against this backdrop, this study investigates the transformations in the visual depiction of academics in the annual reports of six major universities in Hong Kong during the past two decades. Drawing on critical visual analysis, the study shows that the communicative purposes of the images have shifted from reporting the research process to promoting research outcomes. The visual identities of academics have shown clear transformations of becoming increasingly individualized, entrepreneurial and self-promotional. With a higher degree of social interaction and closer social distance with viewers, they are playing an increasingly important role in building public relations. The study enriches the social analysis of neoliberalization as a process through the quantitative and diachronic lens. It demonstrates how a visual analytical method applied to the critical analysis of identity construction and university discourse can provide an explicit understanding of the visual manifestations of neoliberalism in higher education and its diachronic change.

The multimodal and visual nature of children’s picturebooks has been documented in research emanating from multiple fields of inquiry. In this article, the authors present three types of analytical frameworks that are useful for conducting research on contemporary picturebooks as multimodal entities. Each framework draws upon different aspects of visual images, design features, and written language, and uses different theoretical lenses to call forth particular aspects of contemporary picturebooks. The three analytical frameworks are: (1) social semiotic frameworks, (2) literary frameworks, and (3) artistic frameworks. This article suggests that only through an orchestration of a range of analytical frameworks can scholars and educators begin to understand the complexity of contemporary picturebooks and their role in educational settings.

This article addresses visual optimal innovations such as memes, advertising images and editorial cartoons which take Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam as input, and rework it so that novel meaning is created that takes the meaning of the input as base. The authors focus on the cognitive and structural aspects of these kinds of visual stimulus. They argue that visual optimal innovations are aesthetically rewarding owing to how they invite meaning construction, and they further demonstrate that these aspects of visual communication are encoded in human memory to make up entries in a ‘visual lexicon’. The main questions addressed are: What graphic procedures are employed to create such stimuli, and how are they structured? How are existing and novel meanings evoked by visual optimal innovations, and how are they aligned? How are visual optimal innovations processed and interpreted? And, finally, how is all this knowledge – structural and conceptual – cognitively represented?