Isabel Pedersen Designing Visual Language is organized into 4 parts and 10 chapters. Kostelnick and Roberts focus upon the visual within the written mode. They are concerned with the visual nature of written text, the visual components that accompany text and the ways in which a document operates as a visual entity as a whole. They do touch on online media, but not in a thorough way. They introduce their core vocabulary early in the work.
Perception is also important for visual language.
It is not confined to the senses, but it also entails various kinds of thinking. Kostelnick draws on two Gestalt principles, figure-ground and grouping , and demonstrates how knowledge of them is useful to designers. Kostelnick and Roberts move through the book analyzing four areas of visual language. Intra level design concerns itself with visual design in the area of the textual character. It includes issues like the meaning behind font size, type and case, character spacing and character symbols.