Back Issues
Because Visible Language is the oldest design journal, we support scholars by making PDFs of all back issues available. The full catalog of back issues is now available!
Editorial Scope
Our mission is to support the community of communication design scholars and practitioners through the publication of rigorous, relevant communication design research.
As an academic journal, we welcome manuscripts on all forms of research in visual communication.
As a journal committed to advancing design through research, our focus is research excellence.
We value publishing independence and are supported by a mixture of institutional generosity and subscription income and conversely we view “pay-to-publish” as a likely corruption of publication quality. Therefore, Visible Language charges no fees for publication.
We have no page limit on the articles we publish although our typical article is between 5,000 and 8,000 words.
A basic premise of the journal is that created visual form is an autonomous system of human communication that must be defined and explored on its own terms. Therefore, Visible Language encourages articles that communicate using both words and images: photos, drawings, diagrams, pictograms, visualizations, charts, tables, and icons.
Though Visible Language is the particular concern of communication designers, manuscripts are sought from the many disciplines that shed light on visual language: neuroscience, cognition, perception, psychology, education, communication, informatics, computer science, library science, linguistics.
Because design is an emerging discipline, we actively support young scholars in their efforts to disseminate their work and are therefore committed to providing the authors quality feedback through substantial high-quality reviews.
Because we are a research journal housed in an academic institution, for young authors we offer coaching to help bring their work up to publishable standards.
To help advance communication design as a discipline, we welcome concepts for special issues devoted to key areas of communication design. If you have an idea for a special issue or would like to guest-edit a special issue topic, please contact Editor Mike Zender: mike.zender@uc.edu
