Critical Layout Analysis

Author(s): Theo Van Leeuwen, Theo von Leeuwen and Gunther Kress
Source: Internationale Schulbuchforschung , 1995, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1995), pp. 25-43
Published by: Berghahn Books

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Schulbuchforschung

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 Theo Van Leeuwen and Gunther Kress

Critical Layout Analysis

l.

All texts are multimodal. Language always comes in the company of other
semiotic modes. When we speak we articulate our message not just with
words, but through a complex interplay of speech, facial expression, gesture
and posture. When we write our message is not only expressed linguistically,
but also through a visual arrangement of marks on a page. Any form of text
analysis which ignores this will not be able to account for all the meanings
expressed in texts.
Nevertheless, there has long been a trend towards the monomodal,
especially in the most "serious", the most highly valued kinds of speech and
writing. Television newsreaders minimize facial expression and gesture, and in
the early days of BBC television were not even shown, as "illustration would
destroy balance" (Inglis, 1983: 211). Academic papers, important documents
and "high" literature worked, and to some extent still work, with words alone,
in densely printed pages, with a minimum of visual illustration, and without
much attention to layout and presentation.
This trend is now being reversed. Increasingly the written text is no longer
structured by linguistic means, through verbal connectors and verbal cohesive
devices, but visually, through layout, through the spatial arrangement of
blocks of text, pictures and other graphic elements on the page. The wordpro-
cessor has accelerated this trend. Writing now everywhere involves close
attention to typeface choices and layout. Newspapers, magazines, company
reports, textbooks and many other kinds of text are no longer just written, but
"designed" and multimodally articulated.
The semiotic modes in such texts can interrelate in different ways. Writing
may remain dominant, with the visual fulfilling a "prosodie" role of highlight-
ing important points and emphasizing structural connections. But it may also
diminish in importance, with the message articulated primarily in the visual
mode, and the words serving as commentary and elaboration. Visually and
verbally expressed meanings may be each other's double and express the same
meanings, or they may complement and extend each other, or even clash and
contradict.
Given these changes in writing practices, it becomes important to develop
modes of text analysis which can adequately describe the interplay between
the verbal and the visual, and adequately analyze visually expressed meanings.
In this paper we will present a descriptive framework for the analysis of layout
which can, we hope, go some way towards achieving these aims. The frame-
work builds on our earlier work (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1990) but extends
and refines it in various ways, and is here published for the first time.

Internationale Schulbuchforschung 17 (1995) S. 25-43 25

Frankfurt: Diesterweg. ISSN 0172-8237

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 In the final sections of the paper we will use the framework to analyze
some pages from two German textbooks, Politik - Lernen und Handeln für
heute und morgen ("Politics - Learning and Acting for Today and Tomor-
row") by Volker Nitzschke (1990) and Thema Politik 7-10 ("The Theme of
Politics") by Paul Ackermann et al. (1987). We hope our analysis will demon-
strate the usefulness of our framework for a critical analysis of the way socially
significant issues are represented in school textbooks.

2.

Layout simultaneously involves three signifying systems, all with a textual

function, all serving to structure the text, to bring the various elements of the
multimodal text together into a coherent and meaningful whole:

Information value :
The placement of elements in a layout endows these elements with the specific
information values that are attached to the various zones of the visual space.
A given element does not have the same value and meaning when it is placed
on the right or on the left, in the upper or in the lower section of the page, in
the centre or in the margins. Each of these zones accords specific values to the
elements placed within it. We will discuss these values in sections 3 to 6 below.

Salience :

The elements of a layout are made to attract the reader's attention to different
degrees, and this through a wide variety of means: placement in the fore-
ground or background, relative size, contrasts in tonal value or colour, differ-
ences in sharpness and so on. This we will discuss in section 7 below.

Framing:
Framing devices (for instance framelines or white space between elements)
can disconnect the elements of a layout from each other, signifying that they
are to be read as, in some sense, separate and independent, perhaps even con-
trasting, items of information.
Connective devices (for instance vectors between elements or repetitions
of shapes and colours) have the opposite effect. They express that the
elements thus connected are to be read as belonging together in some sense, as
continuous or complementary for instance.
We will discuss this in section 8 below. In addition we will, in section 9, pay
attention to the "reading path", the trajectory followed by the reader in scan-
ning or reading the text.
These signifying systems operate simultaneously and are independently
variable. They apply, in fact, not just to layout, but also to the composition of
single pictures, where they also have an integrating function, a function of
bringing the pictorial elements together into a coherent and meaningful whole.
In this paper we will, however, concentrate on layout.

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3.

When a layout polarizes left and right, placing one kind of element on the left,
and another, perhaps contrasting element on the right, the elements on the left
are presented as Given, the elements on the right as New. For something to be
Given means that it is presented as something the reader already knows, as a
familiar and agreed upon departure point for the message. For something to
be New means that it is presented as something which is not yet known to the
reader, hence as the crucial point of the message, the issue to which the reader
must pay special attention. The New is therefore in principle problematic,
contestable, the information at issue, while the Given is presented as com-
monsense and selfevident.

In figure 1, pictures of various forms of environmental pollution are pres-

ented as Given, and pictures of a cleaner environment as New. In other words,
the reader is asked to concentrate on the problem of "Umweltschutz", protec-
tion of the environment.

In figure 2 the verbal text is Given and the pictures are New. On these two
pages, the first pages of the chapter, the reader is asked to concentrate on the
pictorially expressed message rather than on the verbal text. The layout of the
pictures themselves presents the past as Given and the present as New.
Although the chapter is called "Wie es früher war" ("How it was in the past"),
it is on the present, and in particular on the contrast between the drab, black
and white past and the lively, colourful present, that the reader is asked to
focus.

Such structures are ideological in the sense that they may not correspond
to what is the case either for the producer or for the consumer of the layout:
the important point is that the information is presented as though it had that
status or value for the reader, and that readers have to read it within that
structure, even if that valuation may then be rejected by a particular reader.
A similar structure exists in the English language, in the structure of the
clause, as shown by Halliday (1985: 274 ff) whose ideas have played a signifi-
cant role in developing our theory of layout. In language, this is realized by a
combination of word order ("theme-rheme") and intonation. Intonation cre-
ates two peaks of salience within each "tone group", one at the beginning of
the group, and another, the major one, the "tonic", as the culmination of the
New. Thus what comes first (in language it is a question of "before" and
"after" rather than of "left" and "right") is Given, and what comes last is New.
In our earlier work (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1990) we develop these parallels
with language more fully, but it should be stressed that there are no parallels
for all the visual systems we describe (for instance the systems described in the
next three sections have no clear linguistic parallels), and that, in the case of
layout, the analogies are between layout and aspects of speech (intonation and
rhythm), rather than between layout and grammar or (linguistic) discourse
structures.

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Figure 1: Umwelt nützen - Unweit schützen (Ackermann et al., 1987 : 229)

4.

When a layout polarizes top and bottom, placing different, perhaps contrast-
ing, elements in the upper and lower sections of the page, the elements placed
on top are presented as the Ideal and those placed at the bottom as the Real.
For something to be Ideal means that it is presented as the idealized or gen-
eralized essence of the information, and therefore also as its ideologically most
salient part. The Real is then opposed to this in that it presents more specific
information (e.g. details) and/or more "down to earth" information (e.g.

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Figure 2: Wie es früher war ( Nitzschke , 1990 : 28-29)

photographs as documentary evidence, or maps, or statistics) and/or more

practical information (e.g. practical consequences, directions for action etc).
In figure 2 the pictorial history of Frankfurt is presented as the Ideal. It
does not provide much information, but it makes one point very clear: the
present is less grey, more dynamic, more lively than the past. We are better off
now. The past is perhaps not worth dwelling upon too much. The lower sec-
tion of the page contains a timeline diagram which gives more specific and
detailed information about the course of history.
In figure 3 the Ideal presents pictures of immigrants in high status occu-
pations, while the Real presents pictures of immigrants in low status occu-
pations - just how this conflict between an Ideal of equal status and a Real of
class difference is resolved we will discuss later.
The opposition between Ideal and Real can also structure text-image
relations. If the upper part of a page is occupied by text and the lower part by
one or more pictures (or maps or charts or diagrams), the text will play, ideo-
logically, the lead role, and the pictures will play a subservient role, which,
however, is important in its own right, as specification, exemplification, evi-
dence, practical consequence and so on. If the roles are reversed, so that one
or more pictures occupy the top section, then the Ideal, the ideologically fore-
grounded part of the message, is communicated visually, and the text will
serve to comment or elaborate.

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 Figure 3: Ichf Wir ; Andere ( Nitzschke , 7990: 46-47)

5.

Visual composition may also be structured along the dimensions of Centre

and Margin. In contemporary Western layouts this is relatively uncommon.
Most layouts polarize Given and New and/or Ideal and Real. But when
teaching on a media design course in Singapore, we found that it plays an
important role in the visual imagination of young Asian designers. Perhaps it
is the greater emphasis on hierarchy, harmony and continuity in Confucian
thinking that makes centering such a fundamental organizational principle in
their culture. Much of the work produced by these students had strong, domi-
nant centres, surrounded or flanked by relatively unpolarized elements.
When a layout makes significant use of the Centre, placing one element in
the middle and the other elements around it, we will refer to the central
element as the Centre and to the elements that flank it as Margins. For some-
thing to be presented as Centre means that it is presented as the nucleus of the
information to which all other elements are in some sense subservient. The
Margins then are these ancillary, dependent elements. In many cases the Mar-
gins are identical or at least very similar to each other, so that there is no sense
of polarization, no sense of division between Given and New and/or Ideal
and Real, and we will reserve the term Margin for this kind of symmetrical
structure. In other cases, Centre and Margin combine with Given and New
and/or Ideal and Real. In such cases we will keep the terms Given and New
and Ideal and Real and refer to the Centre as Mediator, for reasons to be dis-
cussed in the next section.

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 It follows from our discussion in this and the previous two sections that the
dimensions of visual space constitute the figure of the Cross, a fundamental
spatial symbol in Western culture.

Margin Margin
Ideal Ideal
Given .

Margin Margin
Real Real
Given New

Figure 4: The dimensions of visual

Just how marginal the Margins are

erally, the salience of the Centre. Bu
continue to exist in absentia, as the
everything else turns. The relative i
contemporary Western representatio
W.B. Yeats, the "centre does not hold
porary society.

6.

One common mode of combining Given and New with Centre and Margin is
the triptych. In many medieval triptychs there is no sense of Given and New.
The Centre shows a key religious theme, such as the Crucifixion or the Virgin
and Child, and the side panels show Saints or donors, kneeling down in
admiration. The composition is symmetrical rather than polarized, although
the left was regarded as a slightly less honorific position. In the 16th century,
altar pieces became more narrative, and showed, for instance, the birth of
Christ or the road to Golgotha on the left panel, the Crucifixion in the Centre,
and the Resurrection on the right panel. This could involve some polarization,
albeit subordinated to the temporal order, with the left, for instance, as the
"bad" side (e.g. the transgression of Adam), the right as the "good" side (e.g.
the ascent of the blessed) and the middle panel representing Christ's role as
Mediator and Saviour (e.g. the Crucifixion).
The triptychs in the layout of modern newspapers, magazines and text-
books are generally polarized, with a Given on the left, a New on the right,
and with the central element as Mediator, as bridging and linking the two

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extremes. This is illustrated in figure 5, where "production" is Given and "pol-
lution" New, and where the everyday activities of the consumer form the
Mediator, the link between the two, in a structure that would seem to lay the
blame primarily on the wasteful habits of the consumer: "Was belastet die
Unweit, wenn Menschen essen?", asks the text, and "Was belastet die Um-
welt, wenn Menschen fahren" and "wenn Menschen wohnen?" ("How do our
eating habits affect the environment?"; "How do our driving habits affect the
environment?"; "How do our homes affect the environment?")

Figure 5: Saubere Luft, sauberes Wasser ; gesundes Leben?

(Nitzschke, 1990 : 114-115)

Vertical triptychs are less common than horizontal triptychs, but figure 3 is
an example. As the Ideal we see, in colour, immigrants ("Ausländer",
"foreigners") in high status professions. As the Real we see "foreigners" in
low status professions. This Real is, itself, divided into a Given and a New,
with a colour photo as the Given and a black and white photo as the New, as
though, in the 1990s, the low status of immigrants should be looked at in a
more sober light, and is no longer as Given as it once was. The Mediator is a
single immigrant worker, cleaning a train, and shown in black and white. The
accompanying text encourages students to explore what would happen if "one
day all foreign workers had to leave the Bundesrepublik" What, it asks, would
be the consequences for "the building industry, the children of the workers,
the owners of hostels, the workers themselves, the managers of hospitals and
cleaning firms?" In other words, the triptych, itself the New of the double

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page on which it appears, tells us that foreign workers should perhaps ideally
be able to move into high status professions, but are in reality needed to do
"our" menial jobs. The central image is an attempt to link the two opposites,
to overcome, or at least mitigate, the contradiction. It shows a worker who,
like the high status immigrants in the Ideal, is depicted as an individual, but
who also, like the workers shown in the Real, has a low status job - and he is
shown in the sober modality of black and white realism.

7.

The fundamental function of layout is textual. Layout places the various

meaningful elements into the whole and provides ordering and coherence
among them. So far we have discussed how it determines "where things go",
and how the positioning of the elements on the page endows them with spe-
cific information values in relation to each other. But layout also involves
assigning degrees of salience to the elements of the page. Regardless of where
they are placed, salience can create a hierarchy of importance among the
elements, select some as more important, more worthy of (immediate) atten-
tion than others. The Given may be made more salient than the New, for
instance, or the New more salient than the Given, or both may be equally
salient.
Salience is judged on the basis of visual cues. Readers are intuitively able
to judge the "weight" of the various elements of the layout, and the greater the
weight of an element, the greater its salience. This salience is not objectively
measurable, but results from a complex interaction, a complex trading-off
relationship, between a number of factors: size; sharpness of focus or, more
generally, amount of detail and texture shown; tonal contrast (areas of high
tonal contrast, for instance borders between black and white, have high
salience); colour contrasts (for instance the contrast between highly saturated
and "soft" colours, or the contrast between red and blue); placement in the
visual field (elements not only become "heavier" as they are moved towards
the top, but also appear "heavier" the further they are moved towards the left,
due to an asymmetry in the visual field); perspective (foreground objects are
more salient than background objects, and elements that overlap other
elements are more salient than the elements they overlap); and also quite spe-
cific cultural factors, such as the appearance of a human figure or a potent cul-
tural symbol.
Being able to judge the visual weight of the elements of a layout is being
able to judge how they "balance". The weight they put in the scales derives
from one or more of the factors just mentioned. Taken together, the elements
create a balancing centre, the point, one might say, from which, if one con-
ceived of the elements as part of a mobile, that mobile would have to be sus-
pended. Regardless of whether this point is in the actual centre of the com-
position or off-centre, it often becomes the space of the central message, and
this attests to the "power of the centre" (Arnheim, 1982) to which we alluded

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already, and which exerts itself even when the Centre is an empty space. It fol-
lows that balance is a very bodily aspect of the text, an interface between our
biological and our semiotic selves. Without balance coordination in space is
not possible. Balance forms an indispensable matrix for the production and
reception of spatially organized messages, and for this reason it also plays a
key role in producing the aesthetic pleasure in layout, and hence our affective
relation towards it.
But salience does not only have an aesthetic function. It also plays a vital
role in structuring the message. The picture of contemporary Frankfurt in fig-
ure 2 is in colour and tilted upwards, this in contrast to the other pictures of
Frankfurt. As a result it is the most salient of all these pictures, the picture
which immediately draws attention to itself. Although the chapter is, osten-
sibly, about the past ("Wie es früher war"), it is the present which stands out.
In figure 5 the central pictures are drawings rather than photographs and
their colours are far more saturated and hence far more salient than those of
the photographs which flank them. The central and most salient factor in the
process of environmental pollution is here asserted to be, not large scale
industrial, but small scale domestic pollution, and this assertion is made vis-
ually - the text only asks questions.

8.

The elements of a layout may either be disconnected, marked off from each
other, or connected, joined together. Connection and disconnection are a
matter of degree. Elements may be strongly or weakly framed, and the
stronger the framing, the more the elements are presented as separate units of
information - the context can then colour in the more precise nature of this
separation. Elements may also be strongly or weakly connected, and the
stronger the connection, the more they are presented as one unit of
information, as belonging together.
Disconnection can be realized in many different ways, for instance by
framelines (the thickness or colour of which can then indicate the strength of
the framing), by discontinuities of colour or shape, or simply by empty space
between the elements. In figure 2 the white space around the icons of modern
technology, the astronaut, the aeroplane and the computer, separates the pres-
ent from the preceding stages of history, with relatively little continuity to the
past. The individual pictures in figure 1 are disconnected by strong three-
dimensional frames, and so presented as separate, disconnected, jumbled
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle - a puzzle which can then be solved in the course of
the chapter of which this layout forms the title page.
Connection can be realized by vectors, formed either by features of
depicted objects, such as the tilted angle of the colour photograph of Frank-
furt in figure 2, which creates a connection to the following page, or by
abstract graphic elements, such as the oblique lines formed by the jagged bot-
tom frameline of the text block on top of the left page in figure 2. It can also

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be realized by a repetition, a kind of visual rhyme, between formal features of
the connected elements, shapes or colours for instance, as with the use of
oblique lines in the top left text block, the photograph of contemporary
Frankfurt and the aeroplane in figure 2. Such visual rhymes are not just a play
of forms. The text asks the question "Wirkt das, was früher war, noch heute?"
("Does what worked in the past still work today?"), and its connection with
the photo and the aeroplane, together with the ¿//¿connection between these
three elements and the elements signifying the past, suggests a negative
answer. The past was different, and separate. Das wirkt nicht mehr.

9.

In densely printed pages of text, reading is linear and strictly coded. Such texts
must be read the way they are designed to be read - from left to right and
from top to bottom, line by line. Any other form of reading (skipping, looking
at the last page to see how the plot will be resolved or what the conclusion will
be) is a form of cheating and may produce a slight sense of guilt in the reader.
Other kinds of pages, e.g. traditional comic strips, are also designed to be read
in this way.
The pages discussed in this paper are read differently, and can be read in
more than one way. Their reading path is less strictly coded, less fully pre-
scribed. Readers may flick through the pages, stopping every now and again to
glance at a picture or read a salient piece of text, and perhaps later returning
to the sections which drew their attention. The layout of the pages sets up par-
ticular reading paths, particular hierarchies of the movement of the hypotheti-
cal readers within and across their different elements. Such reading paths
begin with the most salient element, from there move on to the next most
salient element, and so on. We would assume, for instance, that the pictures in
figure 5 are noticed before the text is read, and that the central pictures will be
scanned before the photographs are looked at. In other words, the reading
path moves from the most salient element, the central pictures, to the next
most salient element, the marginal pictures, and from there to the text (if that
text is read at all). And whether the reader only "reads" the pictures or also
part or all of the text, a complementarity, a to-and-fro between text and image
is guaranteed.
The reading path we have just sketched, however, is not the only possible
reading path. It is at best the most plausible one. Pages such as these may be
scanned or read, just as pictures may be taken in at a glance or scrutinized for
their every detail. Different readers will in all likelihood follow different read-
ing paths, and which paths they will follow will depend on their socio-cultural
position, for cultural factors play a significant role in the perception of
salience, and different cultural groupings are likely to have different hier-
archies of salience.
As non-linear texts become more common, even densely printed pages of
text begin to be read differently. The scientist, reading a journal of organic

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chemistry, will glance first at the diagrammatic representations of organic
compounds before deciding whether or not to read the paper. Students pre-
paring for exams will use the index of the textbook to find and highlight the
passages they need, rather than reading the textbook from cover to cover. The
more a text makes use of subheadings, emphatic devices (italics, bold type,
underlining), numbered lists of the typical elements or characteristics of some
phenomenon, tables, diagrams, etc, the more likely it is to be skipread, "used"
rather than read. Linear reading is gradually losing ground in many, perhaps
most domains.
Analyzing reading paths with students we found that some are easy to
agree on, others harder, again others impossible. This was not, we think,
because of a lack of analytical ability on our part or on the part of our stu-
dents, but because of the structure of the texts themselves. Texts encode read-
ing paths to different degrees. Some, though no longer consisting of densely
printed pages, still take the readers by the hand, guiding them firmly through
the text. The examples we have discussed in this paper are of this kind. They
need to make their point in a particular way, because they are all pages which
initiate chapters and define not only the themes of these chapters ("pollution",
"history", "immigrants") but also attitudes towards these themes which then
become the Givens of these chapters, their point of departure.
In other texts one can, with the best will of the world, not detect any read-
ing path that is more plausible than any other. Such texts offer their readers a
choice of reading path, and leave it up to them how to traverse the textual
space. To use the currently fashionable term, they are "interactive". Figure 6 is
perhaps an example. Even though the images are numbered, suggesting a lin-
ear reading, it is doubtful that the page will be read in linear fashion. Its struc-
ture is that of a multifaceted mosaic, rather than a linear arrangement, and its
hierarchy of salience is not linear.
Linear texts, then, are like movies, where the viewers have no choice but to
see the images in an order that has been decided for them, or like an
exhibition in which the works are hung in long corridors through which the
visitors must move, following signs perhaps, to eventually end up at the exit.
Non-linear texts without any clear reading path are like the new technologies
in which viewers can select their own images and view them in an order of
their own choosing, or like an exhibition in a large room which visitors can
traverse in any way they like.
But the way such exhibits are arranged will not be random. It will not be
random that a particular major sculpture is placed in the centre of the room,
or a particular painting hung to the right or to the left of another. The values
of Given and New, Ideal and Real, Centre and Margin are not dependent on
an order of reading. Non-linear texts are structured paradigmatically rather
than syntagmatically. They select the elements that can be read and present
them according to a certain paradigmatic logic, the logic of centre and Margin,
or of Given and New, for instance, and they leave it up to the reader to
sequence and connect these elements.

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Figure 6: Arbeit und Produktion (Ackermann et al., 1987: 77)

10.

Figure 7 provides a summary of the distinctions we have introduced so far.

The double-headed arrows stand for graded contrasts ("more or less" rather
than "either/or") and the curly brackets stand for simultaneous choices (e.g.
"a polarized composition can have both a Given/ New and an Ideal/ Real
structure"). The superscript "I" means "if' and the superscript "T" means
"then" - in other words "if there is no horizontal polarization, then there must
be vertical polarization" (the opposite follows from this).

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 r
Triptych
i- Centered <

I- Mediator/Polarized elemen

L No horizontal polarizatio

structures 3 ' Polarized * ideal/ R

L No vertical polarization
L
r Maximum salience

-*[ r LL Minimum
Minimum t salience
p Maximum framing
- t
V_ L Maximum connectednes
Realizations
Centered: An element (the Centre or Mediator) i
Polarized: There is no element in the centre of t
Triptych: The non-central elements in a centere
or above and below the Mediator
Circular: The non-central elements in a centered composition are placed both above and below and
to the sides of the Centre or Mediator, and further elements may be placed in between these
polar elements
Margin: The non-central elements in a centered composition are identical or near-identical, so crea-
ting symmetry in the composition
Mediator: The central element in a polarized central composition
Given: The left element in a polarized composition or the left polarized element in a centered com-
position. This element is not identical or near-identical to the corresponding right element
New: The right element in a polarized composition or the right polarized element in a centered
composition. This element is not identical or near-identical to the corresponding left ele-
ment

Ideal: The top element in a polarized composition or the top polarized element in a centered com-
position. This element is not identical or near-identical to the corresponding bottom ele-
ment

Real: The bottom element in a polarized composition or the bottom polarized element in a cente-
red composition. This element is not identical or near-identical to the corresponding top
element
Salience: The degree to which an element draws attention to itself, due to its size, its place in the fore-
ground or its overlapping of other elements, its colour, its tonal values, its sharpness or defi-
nition, and other features
Disconnection:The degree to which an element is visually separated from other elements through frameli-
nes, pictorial framing devices, empty space between elements, discontinuities of colour and
shape, and other features
Connection: The degree to which an element is visually joined to another element, through the absence
of disconnection devices, through vectors and through continuities and similarities of colour,
visual shape, etc.

Figure 7: The system of layout

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11.

So far we have used our examples as illustrations of our categories of analysis.

We will now analyze some of them more fully, to show how our framework
can be used for a critical reading of layout structures.
Figure 2 displays the opening pages of a chapter on history. As we men-
tioned already, these pages not only introduce the subject of the chapter, they
also define an attitude towards that subject, and they do so to a large extent
through layout.
The verbal text, placed in the leftmost column, is presented as Given, and,
itself, presents the past as "given": "Uberall gibt es Zeugnisse aus der Vergan-
genheit" ("Everywhere around us there are testimonies from the past"). On
the right of this text, as its New, we find the present. In other words, it is the
present rather than the past which is here presented as requiring our attention
and which forms the crux of the message: that picture of colourful, bustling
Frankfurt, and those emblems of modern technology.
The present also receives greater salience, through the use of colour,
through the dynamic tilting of the photograph and the aeroplane, through the
empty space around the icons of modern technology, and through overlapping
- the present, in the form of the photo of Frankfurt, literally and figuratively
breaks out of the frame of history, and overlaps the frameline on the right of
the page.
Between past and present there is strong framing, strong disconnection,
expressed through the visual contrast between black and white and colour and
between the empty, dreary nature of the past and the dynamic bustling nature
of the modern city, as well as through the empty space between the icons of
modern technology and the other stages on the timeline of history. But there
are also elements of connection, through the visual rhyme between the text
block top left, the colour photograph of Frankfurt and the aeroplane. These
elements cohere together to form the most eyecatching element of the double
page, and also to form a question ("Wirkt das noch heute?" , "Does it still
work today?") and an answer. Together, and in their contrast to the elements
that signify the past, these elements visually formulate a negative answer. Das
wirkt nicht mehr. The present is unlike the past. There is a sharp juncture
between past and present. The real issue is: "Wie ist es heute?".
It is against this background that the rest of the chapter does engage with
history, in disconnected items about Roman architecture and city planning, life
in medieval cities, 19th century housing conditions and so on - not, in other
words, with explicitly political issues, despite the title of the book, "Politik".
The vertical structure of the two pages disconnects the sequence of photo-
graphs and the timeline diagram. The former provides the reader with the
Ideal, the ideological message about the relation between past and present, the
latter is more informative and detailed, providing a summary of history.
The righthand page, finally, contains a vertical triptych. The colour photo
of Frankfurt is also a Mediator, mediating between a past negatively idealized

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as drab, dismal and distant, and the contemporary world of technology and
progress. As such it has common elements with both. With the Ideal it has the
location in common, and the angle from which the photograph is taken. With
the Real it has colour in common, and vectorial dynamism.

12.

Figure 3 shows the opening pages of a chapter entitled "Ich, Wir, Andere"
("Me, Us, and the Others"). The remaining pages of the chapter introduce
"life in a Turkish village", complete with recipes for Turkish food, and then
move on to the question of prejudice, with the ultimate message that "people
on the one hand want to live with people from their own culture, to share
common experiences and activities. . .on the other hand we live together with
people from different cultures and will have to talk to them and work with
them and come to terms with them. . .What can you do to understand other
people?" But before this point is reached, the chapter lays down a number of
Givens, a number of inescapable aprioris.
The Given of the left page is, again, verbal - a brief historical overview of
postwar immigration. New on this page are two salient and colourful graphs,
the top one representing the proportions of immigrants coming from various
countries of origin. This graph is not quite as innocent as it looks. It is drawn
as a chart, and the horizontal axis of such charts is usually a timeline, so that
the charts are typically about the "increase" or "decrease" of some phenom-
enon. This graph, however, is about composition rather than about a temporal
process. It could, and perhaps should, have been drawn as a pie-chart. It can
therefore easily be misread as suggesting a sense of increase, as saying "there
are increasingly many Turkish immigrants". And, in salient yellow, it is the
Ideal with respect to the other, less salient graph, which is in fact a timeline
chart - a Real which shows a decrease , in the amount of successful appli-
cations for political asylum.
The New of the righthand page is the vertical triptych we have already dis-
cussed. Its Ideal is formed by two pictures of successful immigrants. They have
high status professions, and they are shown as individuals, and photographed
from a low angle ("looked up at") and in colour. Its Real is formed by two
pictures of immigrants working in lower status jobs, shown as a group, and
photographed from a high angle ("looked down upon"), and, in part, in black
and white. In other words, it may be "ideal" for immigrants to achieve high
status, but it is not the reality.
How can ideal and reality be reconciled? The central photo also shows an
immigrant worker. Like the high achieving immigrants he is shown as an indi-
vidual, but like the workers in the lower pictures he works in a low status job
and is shown in black and white. But at least he has become a person in his
own right, someone we can "talk to and work with and come to terms with",
rather than an anonymous foreigner in a crowd of other foreigners.

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 The Real of the triptych contains two pictures, one in colour and one in
black and white, and the latter is New. Black and white is frequently a signifier
for documentary reality, and perhaps this is its significance here. Conscious of
the "other" as a person, we must now look at the reality, the necessity of
immigrants doing "our" menial jobs in a more sober light. But it remains a
reality and a practical necessity we cannot get around.
As we already noted, the accompanying text asks the reader: What would
we do without them? The pictures and the layout again provide the answer.
We cannot do without them. We need them. And it is only against this back-
ground that we can begin to ask ourselves questions about our prejudices.

13.

Figure 1 opens a chapter about the environment. Although the individual pic-
tures are numbered, the structure is not linear, and the picture of the country-
side, centre right, is most salient - a picture of the "Lebensraum" after which
we all hanker.
Given on this page are pictures of a polluted environment - a denuded
forest, an industrial complex belching forth smoke, an overflowing rubbish
bin. That we live in a polluted world is not in question and presented as a self-
evident point of departure.
New, on the other hand, is a world cleaned up - the fragile butterfly as a
symbol of the fragile environment, in need of protection; the human rural
environment, clean and spacious; and a picture of technology, but clean-look-
ing technology, a helicopter in an environment of clear water and blue skies.
This, then, is the issue of the chapter, the problem: how to clean up the
environment.
The vertical structure presents fragile nature as the Ideal. Perhaps the four
pictures can be read as something like a story: (1) nature despoilt; (2) the
motorcar, with its unbridled energy consumption, as the culprit; (3) the dump-
ing of cars as the solution; (4) the restoration of nature as the result. But that
is the Ideal. If only it were so simple.
As the Real we have technology, moving from unadulterated pollution to
clean-looking technology. In reality we cannot dump technology. We need it.
The problem is how to clean it up.
The page as a whole is structured as a vertical triptych, and the central pic-
tures not only reiterate the Given of pollution and the New of the clean
environment, saliently and centrally, they also act as Mediators. A picture of
industrial pollution forms a bridge between the despoliation of nature and the
pollution of the human environment. The clean rural environment is shown as
on the one hand like nature (the butterfly), and on the other hand like tech-
nology (it is, after all, a human environment).
Compared to the picture of the rural landscape, the picture of the heli-
copter may seem small and insignificant. But its position is important. New
and Real, it is the position of the pragmatic imperative. In advertisements it is

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here that one finds the information necessary for obtaining the product, the
name and address of the advertiser, or the tear-out coupon. In textbooks it is
here that one finds the questions and the assignments, in other words, the
things the pupil must do. And on this page it is here that one finds the answer,
before the chapter has even started: we cannot do without technology, but we
must find ways of making it less harmful for the environment. That is the task
we are faced with.

14.

On each of the pages we have analyzed major ideological issues are at stake,
and in each case they are articulated multimodally, through the orchestration
of visual and verbal elements achieved by layout.
We hope that our analysis has demonstrated that layout cannot be ignored
in critical readings of texts of this kind, and that it plays a significant role in
the representation of social issues. Layout is not just a matter of making the
text more attractive, more "pupil-friendly", although it does that too. It is a
semiotic mode of its own, and as such it contributes vitally to the production
of meaning in texts. In this visual age it is highly unlikely that such meanings
would escape children, even if at present the means for making ourselves con-
scious of them are still in their infancy compared to the rich resources we have
for analyzing the linguistic code.

Zusammenfassung
Das Layout dient nicht nur dazu, Texte attraktiver zu gestalten, es leistet auch
einen wichtigen Beitrag zu der Struktur und der Bedeutung von multimodalen
Texten, die sprachliche und visuelle Kommunikation kombinieren. Es arbeitet
gleichzeitig auf drei Ebenen. Die Layout-Elemente (Textblöcke, Bilder und
andere graphische Elemente) sind durch ihre Seitenpositionierung mitei-
nander verbunden (links-rechts, oben-unten und Mitte-Rand), was ihnen
einen spezifischen informativen Wert wie „gegeben" und „neu", „ideell" und
„real", „zentral" und „marginal" verleiht. Die Elemente stechen unterschied-
lich hervor und verbinden sich oder heben sich voneinander auf verschiedene
Weise ab. Eine Analyse von Seiten aus zwei deutschen Schulbüchern der
Sozialkunde/ Politik für das Gymnasium veranschaulicht den Wert dieser
Layout-Methode für eine kritische Analyse der Schulbuchdarstellung von
sozialen Fragen.

Résumé

La mise en page n'est pas seulement un moyen de rendre les textes plus attray-
ants, elle contribue également beaucoup à la structure et au sens de textes
multimodaux combinant la communication linguistique et visuelle. Elle opère
simultanément à trois niveaux. Les éléments de mise en page (blocs textuels,

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illustrations et autres éléments graphiques) sont reliés les uns aux autres de par
leur positionnement sur la page ( gauche-droite, haut-bas et centre-marge), ce
qui les dote d'une valeur informative spécifique comme „donné" et „nou-
veau", „conceptuel" et „réel", „central" et „marginal". Ces éléments ont aussi
différents angles saillants et différents degrés de correspondance ou de diver-
gence les uns des autres. L'analyse de pages provenant de deux manuels sco-
laires allemands d'éducation civique destinés aux lycéens démontre la valeur
de cette approche de la mise en page pour une analyse critique de la façon
dont les problèmes sociaux sont présentés dans les manuels scolaires.

References

Ackermann, P., Becker, H., Feick, J., Hufnagel, G. and Uhi, H. (1987) Thema Politik
7-10 , Stuttgart, Ernst Klett Schulbuchverlag
Arnheim, R. (1982) The Power of the Centre , Berkeley, Los Angeles, UCLA Press
Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) Introduction to Functional Grammar , London, Edward
Arnold
Inglis, K.S. (1983) This is the ABC - The Australian Broadcasting Commission
1932-1983, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press
Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (1990) Reading Images , Geelong, Deakin University
Press

Nitzschke, V. (1990) Politik - Lernen und Handeln für heute und morgen , Band 1 ,
Frankfurt an Main, Verlag Moritz Diesterweg

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