Research about how people respond to political visual communication is, at some point, going to require actual people.
The survey sheets – printed in two versions, digital and risograph, each featuring the same slogan across a range of typographic and colour variations – were taken to Graz to find out how respondents would describe what they saw. The central question was simple: does this design feel more liberally or more conservatively coded? A secondary question, embedded in the two-format structure of the research, was whether the printing method itself influenced that perception.
The methodology is modest by academic standards. This is not a large-scale political study with demographically controlled sample groups and validated measurement instruments. It is a small survey, conducted locally, designed to probe a specific question that the previous posts in this series have been building toward: are the visual associations that design theorists, political communication scholars and cultural critics describe actually legible to ordinary audiences encountering print in public space?
Put differently – does any of this actually work on real people, in real streets, outside the theoretical framework?
The choice to conduct the survey in Graz was partly practical and partly relevant. Graz is not a politically homogeneous city. Like most contemporary urban environments, it contains a layered political geography: neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood variation in how political communication circulates, which posters appear on which walls, which ideological registers feel familiar and which feel foreign. Asking respondents in this specific context meant working with a readership that already has some existing exposure to Austrian political visual culture – a culture with its own distinct typographic conventions, colour associations and propaganda histories. It is also where I live, so that is convenient (one might even say it played a rather big part of making the choice of where to execute the survey).
The format of the survey was deliberately simple. Participants were shown individual design variations and asked to locate them politically. No explanations were given about what the design choices were intended to communicate. No context was provided beyond the printed sheet itself. The idea was to capture first-response perception rather than considered analytical judgement.
This is, in part, what the survey was always about.
The theoretical argument throughout this series has been that political visual literacy operates largely automatically. Audiences do not consciously decode typography or colour symbolism in the way a graphic designer or semiotician might. They simply respond. They feel a design as radical or institutional, modern or traditional, approachable or aggressive, before any conscious analysis takes place. The survey was designed to catch that response rather than the retrospective rationalisation of it.
The methodological imperfections are real and worth naming clearly. The colour divergence between digital and risograph versions, acknowledged during the printing process, means that responses to the two formats cannot be compared as cleanly as the research design originally intended. Participants in both conditions are not responding to the same object with only the medium changed. They are responding to objects that differ both texturally and chromatically. Any conclusions drawn about the influence of printing method specifically will need to account for this.
There is also the question of sample size, selection bias and the cultural specificity of Graz as a research location. A small local survey cannot produce generalisable claims about how political design is universally received. What it can produce is something more specific and, arguably, more interesting: a situated, localised account of how one set of people, in one city, at one moment, responded to a set of deliberately constructed political visual stimuli.
In the context of a blog series about the political life of analogue media, that situatedness feels appropriate.
Physical political communication is always local. It exists in specific places, read by specific people in specific contexts. A wheat-paste poster in Vienna and the same poster in Graz may be encountered by quite different political imaginations. The survey does not erase that specificity by pretending to statistical universality. It inhabits it.
And perhaps this is fitting for research about analogue media, conducted through analogue methods, in public space.
The results may be imperfect. The print colours did not quite match. The sample is small. The comparisons have limits.
But the question was always worth asking.
Does the visual feel of a design communicate ideology before the words are read?
The next post will look at what people actually said.
Sources:
- Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
- Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
- Couldry, N. (2012). Media, Society, World. Polity Press.
- McQuiston, L. (1993). Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. Phaidon.
