A Study of Visual Impact in the illustration of Public Service Advertisement

Sun, Byoung Il(Advertising Design, Dept. of Industrial Design Graduate School of Industrial Art, Hong-Ik University )
Directed by Prof. Kwon, Myung Kwang

Korea's Public Service Advertising(PSA) has short history of 12 Years, but it has experienced rapid growth. PSA was started with the intention to solve all kinds of social problems and to promote the public welfare with outstanding persuasive communication. Though our history of PSA is short comparing to USA(started 1941) and Japan(started 1971), we hardly can deny the facts of its noticeable contribution to our society and great future potential. But as all fields in early stage are experiencing, PSA also has shown some unsatisfactory points in main motif, production technique and consistency of campaign. Especially the effectiveness of production technique is considered to be improved and stydied more in a sense of quality. In PSA through printed media, since the illustration is frequently used, it is necessary to evaluate how strongly this illustration is appealing visually to target audience and whether this illustration expressed along with design concept, copy, and layout really will effectively influence target audience with the harmonized message.

Considering the above conditions, the visual impact of the illustration can be tile rule as an important psychological factor for measuring the effectiveness of the communication of the contents and message of advertising. Therefore visual impact is a logical necessity in printed PSA considering the sensitive conditions of complicated modern society and public that never pay attention to the vague visual appeal. We can find the significance of visual impact in inducing public attention and maximizing the effective message communication.

Indeed, PSA based on humanism, can provide new communication era with the method called, "Visual Impact" which expresses the chief objective of PSA by illustration, that is to reach its ultimate aim of public enlightment through evoking sympathy, 1 chose the visual impact of illustration as the topic of this study because I have thought the visual impact appeals to or influences directly the public by evoking their sympathy. Therefore this dissertation will touch visual-cognitive theory and advertising psychology in general, review on mechanism awareness by visual factors, and analyze the domestic and foreign PSA's concentrating on visual impact in the side of contents and composition to review and improve visual effectiveness of illustration as PSA expression factors. This dissertation examined the theoretical statements of illustration and PSA and classified and analayzed relation of visual impact and visual-cognitive, by the idea and characteristics of visual impact, and advertising psychology.

Also this study analyzed the visual factors for visual impact in the area of size, scale, shape, space, color, layout, humor, association, feeling, senses, illusion, etc. and discussed the problems of visual aspects of PSA and possible solutions to them by stating the current situation of PSA illustration, analyizing samples of visual impact in the aspects of subject, media, and expression method, and analyizing the domestic and international samples of printed PSA by questionnaire.