Visual Rhetoric Essay

Pascual Lewis

Professor Plummer

ENGL 211c

5 October 2021

Visual Rhetoric

Trying to share new information with the public can be difficult. One common and effective way of sharing information is using a poster. A Poster can be found anywhere and can be used for multiple purposes. Posters can be found at universities, restaurants, or online. A good poster needs to be clear and easy to understand. Not only does a poster need to concisely get the point across but use visual tools to grab the audience’s attention. Around Old Dominion University posters are used to share news about clubs or events. A poster can also be used to share a person or groups opinion on a specific topic. One debatable topic in today’s society is animal testing. A few years ago, a poster was made to share an outlook on animal testing. The poster read, “100 MILLION ANIMALS ARE KILLED EACH YEAR IN US LABORATORIES. PUT AN END TO ANIMAL TESTING.” By using font, shape, and color this poster effectively showed its audience why animal testing is cruel and should be put to a stop.

Being able to read what a poster is saying can be very crucial. A poster would be less efficient if the audience could not read the poster and had to guess the purpose. In this animal testing poster, the font is very big and bold. The words on the poster can be easily read from a distance. In addition, every letter is uppercase. The use of uppercase letters and big font catches the audience’s attention and lets them know what they are about to read is going to be a bold and powerful statement. By creating a strong, authoritative statement the poster is using ethos. Also, some words seem to look bigger than others. For instance, “100 Million” looks taller than the other words. The poster is pushing the fact that 100 million lab animals are killed each year. Using this fact shows how the poster uses logos. The font also looks sloppy and aggressive. It almost looks like someone took a brush and just painted the words on the poster. This messy or chaotic look adds to the purpose of the poster and how they are trying to tell their audience how animal testing is an inhumane act.

The words on the poster are not the only way to tell the audience the purpose. Shapes can represent many things and are a significant part of this poster. One of the most noticeable aspects of this poster is the shape that the rat is in. The dead rat is trapped inside a perfume bottle. This represents how animals are killed to make a common product, like perfume. Since perfume is a product that people use in everyday life the poster is using pathos by connecting to the audience. The perfume bottle also represents a cage that rats are usually trapped in when taken to a laboratory. Another shape that helps the audience realize the purpose of this poster is the rat’s tail. The sharp and angular looking tail can symbolize the sharp needle that they put into lab animals or it can add to the horrific element of the poster. Without words the poster can still show why animal testing is cruel.

One more important aspect of the poster that helps bring it all together is the color. The most eye-catching color is the bright red. The red background brings out a fiery emotion that makes the audience feel something about the poster. Then, the red rat helps with drawing attention and creating a center point. As the audience reads the poster, they will notice how the word killed is in red. Killed is a very intense word and making it red just makes it that much more alarming and emotional. Towards the bottom of the poster it reads, “PUT AN END TO ANIMAL TESTING” in all red. Most posters that deal with a controversial topic want to produce change. Putting this in all red makes it pop out to the audience and hopefully make people want to take action. The other two colors on the poster are black and white. Black and white mainly help the audience read the poster with ease. Although, the color black can symbolize the death of lab animals. This poster uses pathos by picking colors that make the audience emotional about animal testing.

People nowadays seem to be in a rush and do not want to take the time to sit down and read information or listen to a speech. It is easy to take a quick glance though, and that is why visual tools are so important. This poster about animal testing grabs attention and quickly shows the audience how animal testing should be seen. The visual tools are successful at persuading the audience.

Works Cited

Johnson, Kit. “Stop Animal Testing.” Behance, 13 June 2019,

https://www.behance.net/gallery/81517201/Stop-Animal-Testing. Accessed 30 Sep. 2021.