Refining Specifications of Decorative/Indicative Balance in Menu Design
Noël T. Alton Brigham Young University ntalton@gmail.com	Alan Manning Brigham Young University alan_manning@byu.edu

Most style guides set up general rules that will help create a well designed document:

· Color, shapes and borders can be used to unify

· White space, tables and paragraphs can be used to organize

Several ads for color printers point out that:

· Color enhances visual appeal

· Color increases response by 80%

And so the suggestions continue. The problem is: But how much is too much? Where do we draw the line between appeal and overload?

“Interpretative Paraphrase”	“Application Awareness”	“Applications Explained”
Roland Barthes	Rudolf Arnheim	C.S. Peirce/Amare & Manning
“…two different garments are dealt with [in fashion magazines]. The first is the one presented to [the viewer] as photographed, or drawn –it is image-clothing. The second is the same garment, but described, transformed into language.” “the described dress and the photographed dress are united in the actual dress they both refer to.” From The Fashion System.	“As symbols, fairly realistic images have the advantage of giving flesh and blood to the structural skeletons of ideas…. But, they may be inefficient otherwise because the objects they represent are, after all, only part-time symbols.” “…highly abstract concepts, although narrow in intension, are broad in extension, that is, they can refer to many things.” From Visual Thinking	…following Peirce and sorting [rhetorical] goals into three major heuristic categories: 1. To evoke feelings 2. To provoke action 3. To promote understanding” “If the goal of using the visual is decorative… or if the goal is indicative…then we might expect that images will be preferable to diagrams.” From Back to the Future and Using Visual Rhetoric to Avoid PowerPoint Pitfalls

Effects of added design features (horizontal axis) on overall preference (vertical axis).