Illustration as a Communication System: A Theoretical and Integrated Review of Visual Meaning Generation in Graphic Design

Abstract

Although the phenomenon of illustration is ubiquitous today in contemporary communication in fields ranging from editorial graphics and infographics to brand identities and promotion campaigns, communication research has in most cases ignored illustration and treated it as a peripheral decorative phenomenon, not just as the autonomous system of meaning production. This theoretical review takes an integrative approach in which the scattered knowledge in semiotics, visual rhetoric, narrative theory, multimodality, cognitive psychology, and critical cultural studies is assembled to create a unified structure to comprehend illustration as a composition of communication. Basing its results on the systematic analysis of 127 structured studies on six theoretical traditions (1980-2023), this study reveals persistent conceptual ambiguities and theoretical blind spots, as well as methodological issues that prevent the recognition of illustration as a valid subject in communication research. We introduce a four-dimensional integrative model that structures illustration as a specific communicative system that has semiotic, cognitive–affective, rhetorical-discursive, and contextual-technological characteristics. This theoretical framework provides an analytical and practical guideline to be used in empirical studies and a research agenda for examining power, ethics, visual literacy, and algorithmic illustration. Our findings show that illustration is not decorative, but it is a form of communication with specific interpretive, persuasive, and cultural production possibilities, which cannot be ignored by communication theory.