From image to identity icon: Discourses of organizational visual identity on Australian university homepages

Abstract

This article explores how universities construe organizational identities and engage digital audiences through images on web homepages. Combining visual content analysis and a discourse-analytic approach informed by social semiotics, I interpret the discourses of identity in 400 images from organizational homepages of four top-tier public universities in Sydney, Australia – University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of Technology Sydney, and Macquarie University. Based on the social semiotic interpretation of images, I identify eight identity icons, each deploying a combination of semiotic resources to represent a specific organizational identity. The analysis suggests that universities prioritize featuring people, which results in an augmented sense of social presence on the homepage. Lastly, four identified strategies for digital audience engagement in images – proximation, alignment, equalization, and subjectivation – point to how these are instrumental in representing university life as both individual and shared experiences.

Keywords

Discourse analysis images image-centricity organizational identity semiotic technology social semiotics university homepage

Context

As a result of an ongoing and recently intensified exchange between universities and a corporate milieu, marketization now permeates academic discourses more evidently than ever before. In the age of unprecedented global flow of information and capital, universities are increasingly forced to exploit new avenues to increase their visibility. One such relatively recent promotional space is an organizational website as a digital medium used for the purposes of enhancing university competitiveness both locally and globally. In the past few years, university websites have been addressed through multidisciplinary study, particularly from a discourse-analytic perspective (e.g., Lažetić, 2019; Svendsen and Svendsen, 2018; Tomášková, 2015; Zhang et al., 2020). This work has generated insights into various aspects of university promotion, emphasizing the transformation of organizational websites from purely informational sources to highly promotional tools. Within the website infrastructure, a homepage is most strategically important to a university.

As an entry point to a website, a homepage is the first contact with the university. It presents information about the university and its operations, provides an overview of the website structure, and establishes the identity of the organization (Djonov and Knox, 2014). As such a computer-mediated environment lacks reciprocity, identity communication relies on various visual cues to distinguish the university from other actors in the same category. In brand management studies, such visual cues are referred to as (organizational) identity elements (Melewar and Akel, 2005) and include ‘business name’, ‘logo’, ‘motto’, ‘color’, and ‘typography’. These elements (apart from ‘motto’ rarely featured on modern university homepages) are integrated in the viewport – the visible ‘above the fold’ space of the homepage, presented upon link activation (Figure 1). In addition to commonly recognized visual identity elements, most of the viewport space on university homepages is dedicated to a large photographic image. Such a considerable space allocation to the image in the ‘guaranteed viewing area’ of the page (Nielsen and Pernice, 2009) suggests that the university values images as a relevant and essential resource for organizational visual identity communication.

Figure 1.

Viewport of the University of Technology Sydney homepage (https://web.archive.org/web/20201012050322/https://www.uts.edu.au/).

Spatially dominant visual content comprised of an extensive photographic or abstract image structures a significant portion of the viewport into an image-complex – arguably the most image-centric layout structure of the page. As such, the viewport image serves as a glue for integrating other design units, such as headlines and navigational arrows, which permeate its space (Laba, 2023: 186). Reflective of the visual turn in online communication (see Oeldorf-Hirsch and Sundar, 2016: 625), ‘image-centricity’ (Stöckl et al., 2020) is characteristic of an overarching design strategy of university homepage viewports. In this context, understanding how universities invite digital audiences to form an identification with the organization through image-centric design structures is an essential key to understanding discourses of organizational visual identity. More specifically, this study asks: What visual identities do images on university homepages construe and how do they engage the viewer? To answer these questions, I examine the content of images and identify the strategies for audience engagement, focusing on the visual design choices and representational and interactional meaning potentials (for details, see next section).

The paper investigates visual identity construction on the homepages of four public universities in Sydney, Australia. The location served as a data exclusion criterion that helped to delimit the scope of the study and remove the potential variations in city branding as part of the destination marketing strategy. The four university homages were selected from a larger corpus of Australian university websites for a research project on multimodal discourse analysis of organizational identity communication (see Laba, 2023). The selected organizations are top-tier, world-class Australian universities – the University of Sydney (https://www.sydney.edu.au/), University of New South Wales (UNSW; https://www.unsw.edu.au/), University of Technology Sydney (UTS; https://www.uts.edu.au/), and Macquarie University (https://www.mq.edu.au/). A corpus of 400 images from the viewports of the four homepages between 26 August 2015 and 1 January 2021 was collected in January 2021 through Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/). Using visual content analysis and a discourse-analytic approach informed by social semiotics (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2021; Van Leeuwen, 2008), I developed an annotation schema to document visual design choices in images – based on vectors, frame size, angle of depiction, and gaze (Tables 1 and 2), and applied it to the corpus imported into MAXQDA Analytics Pro software for mixed-method analysis (https://www.maxqda.com/). Since the meaning taken by the viewer is never precisely the meaning envisaged by the image producer (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2021: 135), the focus was on the common denominator of the production and reception sides – ‘the site of the image itself’ (Rose, 2016: 32). It is appropriate to acknowledge that the identities construed in images are up for negotiation – that is, the audience can identify with them or reject them, but either way, we first need to understand what they mean.

From image to identity icon: A social semiotic approach

As a theory of meaning, social semiotics informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics provides a theoretical framework for this study. Social semiotics has received its key impetus from Halliday’s (1978) view on language as a semiotic resource used by discursive communities to communicate specific bundles of meaning in their social, cultural, and historical contexts. The linguistic approach was further extended to visual images in the pioneering ‘grammar of visual design’ by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2021) who proposed a systematized way to address meaning making practices in visual images. More recently, the significance of studying identity from a social semiotic point of view has been emphasized in the work of Van Leeuwen (2021), stressing the potential of identity design realizing “the styles which express the values that make up identities” (p. 28, italics in original) through functional elements like color, texture, shape, and materiality (p. 28).

The current study is positioned in the developing subfield of social semiotics, termed semiotic technology studies (Van Leeuwen et al., 2013) interested in understanding the potential, limitations, and power of different (digital) technologies in specific contexts. Types of semiotic technologies so far addressed from a social semiotic perspective include websites (Poulsen, 2022), Microsoft PowerPoint (Djonov and Van Leeuwen 2017; Van Leeuwen et al., 2013), social media (Djonov and Van Leeuwen, 2018; Poulsen, 2018; Poulsen et al., 2018), digital art (Van Leeuwen and Johannessen, 2022, and interactivity as discourse (Poulsen, 2022). The overarching aim of a semiotic technology approach is captured well by Poulsen et al. (2018), who state that the main focus is on interrogating

. . . how social and semiotic assumptions and norms are inscribed in software and other kinds of technology, and realized in social practices that use the technology (p. 594).

For this study, approaching a homepage as a semiotic technology is beneficial because it allows us to account for its nuances as a medium for organizational identity communication. As such, it affords a set of limited interactional possibilities with the rhetor-institution, and, in the context of the viewport image-complexes, these possibilities are limited to examining the image on the homepage or clicking on the image and read the full story on the subsequent page. Recognizing these affordances of homepages and contrasting them with other spaces for identity communication (e.g., social media) allows for a sharper focus on the rhetorical interests of organizations and their self-identity as manifested in the most strategic space of the homepage.

Seeking to understand conceptualizations of organizational visual identity in a particular kind of context (i.e., higher education), the study draws on Kress and Van Leeuwen (2021), and addresses the variety and scope of visual structural elements in images through three dimensions/kinds of meaning:

(i) The ideational metafunction – the representation of the university and relevant communities;

(ii) The interpersonal metafunction – the enactment of social relationships between the university and the digital audience;

(iii) The textual metafunction – the organization of visual elements in the image.

Since this study is interested in the visual personae images construe, and how they enact identification with the university, the focus is on the ideational and interpersonal¹ aspects of images. To examine how images represent universities (i.e., their ideational meanings), the study analyzes images for two types of representational structures identified by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2021: 55): narrative and conceptual. These are judged from the presence or absence of vectors or oblique lines that emanate from the depicted entity referred to as a ‘represented participant’ – human (i.e., a person) or non-human (i.e., an abstraction or place). The visible vectors vary from abstract (e.g., arrows) to naturalistic (e.g., an outstretched arm). The invisible vectors only apply to images featuring people or anthropomorphized entities where the directionality of the gaze of a represented participant can be identified. The presence or absence of vectors in images form the visual evidence for the identification several types of representational structures summarized in Table 1. In sum, represented participants are depicted dynamically in narrative structures and statically in conceptual structures. These structures contribute to constructing specific visual personae or university portraits complemented with interactional strategies for audience engagement.

Table 1.

Coding frame for analysis of the ideational meanings in images based on Kress and Van Leeuwen (2021: 44–112).

Factor	System	Choice 1	Choice 2	Realization
Vector	Narrative	Action	Transitive	Actor; Goal
		Action	Intransitive	Actor; ø Goal
		Verbal process		Speech vector
		Reaction	Transactional	Reacter; Phenomenon
		Reaction	Non-transactional	Reacter; ø Phenomenon
ø^a vector	Conceptual	Analytical structure	Structured	Carrier; Attributes
		Analytical structure	Unstructured	Attributes; ø Carrier
		Classification	Overt	Symmetrical orientation^Superordinate
		Classification	Covert	Symmetrical orientation
		Symbolic	Attributive	Symbolic attributes
		Symbolic	Suggestive	Symbolic Carrier

ø stands for ‘None’.

To examine how images shape audience engagement (i.e., their interpersonal meanings) in ‘human’ images, the study considers three systems of visual design choices proposed by Van Leeuwen (2008: 138–141): social distance, social relation, and social interaction. Social distance refers to how much of the human body is visible in a frame and varies from intimate to personal, socio-consultative, and public. Social relation refers to the perspective of representation across the frame’s horizontal (involvement) and vertical (power) axes. Social interaction refers to the choices made regarding whether to include (direct address) or exclude (indirect address) eye contact with the audience. The choices across these systems are summarized in Table 2. They form the basis for understanding how images position digital audiences to relate to the university.

Table 2.

Coding frame for analysis of the interpersonal meanings in images based on Van Leeuwen (2008: 136–148).

Factor	System	Choice	Realization
Size of frame	Social distance	Intimate	Extreme close-up shot
		Personal	Medium close shot
		Socio-consultative	Medium shot
		Public	Long shot
Horizontal angle	Involvement	Involvement	Frontal angle
Horizontal angle	Involvement	Detachment	Oblique angle
Vertical angle	Power	Representation	Low angle
		Equality	Eye-level angle
		Viewer	High angle
Gaze	Social interaction	Direct address	Eye contact
Gaze	Social interaction	Indirect address	ø Eye contact

The ideational metafunction provides the basis for understanding how images semiotically represent the university, and the interpersonal metafunction helps to uncover how the interaction between the rhetor-institution and the digital audience is shaped. Specific visual personae/identity icons emerge when ideational meanings in images are discharged, and interpersonal meanings are charged. Following Martin (2010), I refer to this process as iconization, and examine how the ideational and interpersonal meanings in images combine into couplings, whereby the represented participants in the image become an ‘identity icon’. Furthermore, the concept is applied of commitment to determine the degree of specificity of the meanings instantiated in image-complexes, which helps to identify a set of ‘compulsory’ visual structures required to communicate a specific visual identity icon and account for additional (intermodal) resources.

To use the image-complex from the viewport of the UTS homepage as an example (Figure 2), we observe a female researcher in a lab coat, gloves, and safety goggles. Ideationally, the represented structure is that of transitive action, with a featured individual (Actor) working with a tube (Goal). The image subject is looking away rather than making eye contact with us, the viewer. As a result, the image can be seen as presented for observation instead of “asking” us to symbolically engage with the represented participant, foregrounding the agency of the depicted individual.

Figure 2.

Representation of an individual engaged in transitive action (https://web.archive.org/web/20201012050322; https://www.uts.edu.au/).

In addition, the headline ‘UTS researchers make the cut for science ‘Oscars’’ framed in the overlaid rectangular box couples with the image of the female scientist, specifying that the image-complex represents a community of researchers at the university. In this way, the ideational meanings of the image are discharged, and the interpersonal meanings are charged. The subject in the image is both a researcher representationally and a researcher at UTS symbolically. Moreover, this researcher is active rather than passive, which is foregrounded through a transitive action. Through iconization, the image-complex thus construes the identity icon of a UTS researcher as an individual agent. While the headline complements this type of identity construction, the minimal ‘committed’ set of visual structures comprises an individual represented participant, transitive action, and indirect address.

For this study, there are two theoretical advantages of examining the interplays of ideational and interpersonal meanings. The first is the recognition of the social and semiotic nature of visual choices regulated and realized in images, which is foundational to understanding organizational visual communication on university websites. The second is that this approach can be operationalized on an analytical level. That is, it allows an identification of the visual structures across ideational and interpersonal dimensions of meaning and an examination of how their combinations unfold to construe specific visual identity icons. The latter is categorized in relation to the nature of representational content, based on depictions of people, places, and abstractions, as next section explains.

Types of visual identity icons

The inclusion of human represented participants augments social presence on all four university homepages, representing university life as a social, shared, and collaborative experience. People were featured in 66.75% of the corpus (267 images), slightly more often in groups (52%; 139 instances) than as individuals (48%; 128 instances). As organizational websites do not afford immediate possibilities for interacting with other audiences (in contrast to, e.g., social media platforms), the sense of connectedness and belonging is fostered through ‘human images’. Featured groups of people and individuals represent different university members and aim to elicit (favorable) attitudes. As documented in the research literature, social presence on the web enhances effective interaction (Nadeem et al., 2020), satisfaction (Richardson et al., 2017), and online trust (Hassanein & Head, 2007).

As more images featured people, they were found to construe a greater variety of identity icons, all contributing to the effect of ‘being there’ with others. Depictions of places (11.25%; 45 instances) and abstractions, such as shapes, visual symbols, lines (22%; 88 instances) were far less prominent yet significant in representing the material and symbolic features of the university through architectural imagery and conceptual structures. Table 3summarizes the identified types of visual identity icons, noting the committed and complementary design choices across the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. For visual realizations of committed and complementary metafunctional couplings, the reader is invited to refer to Tables 1 and 2.

Table 3.

Types of visual identity icons in image-complexes in the viewports of university homepages.

Visual Identity icon		Metafunctional couplings
		Ideational		Interpersonal
		Committed	Complementary	Committed	Complementary
3.1	Social community	Group of people + transactional reaction + setting (social event/gathering)	x	Indirect address + socio-consultative or personal social distance + detachment	Equal power
3.2	Agentive community	Group of people + transitive action	Transactional reaction	Indirect address + detachment	x
3.3	Community achievers	Group of people + overt taxonomy (superordinate usually realized by verbal text)	(Superordinate realized by a symbol – e.g., a trophy)	Direct address + involvement	Public distance
3.4	Agent	Individual + transitive action	Transactional reaction	Indirect address + socio-consultative or personal social distance	Viewer power
3.5	Achiever	Individual + analytical structure + naming (verbal naming of the award through a headline) or visually (e.g., a trophy)	x	Direct address + involvement	Socio-consultative distance
3.6	Aspirant	Individual + non-transactional reaction	x	Indirect address + representation power	Personal or socio-consultative distance
3.7	University as a physical entity	Places + analytical structure	People	x	Public distance + detachment
3.8	University as an abstract entity	Abstractions + Analytical structure	x	x	x

Group representation: University experience is shared

In images featuring groups of people, a combination of transactional reaction and indirect address is the most frequent coupling of ideational and interpersonal meanings in the annotated corpus (3.1 in Table 3). Representationally, this image type emphasizes transactional reactions, where represented participants (i.e., Reacters) are looking at other represented participants in the frame (i.e., Phenomena). The gaze is usually reciprocated, meaning people in images share eye contact. The social interaction between image subjects unfolds in a social setting (usually indoors, with other people in the background). Interpersonally, this kind of group depiction is presented for observation as people in images do not address the audience directly by looking at the camera. A combination of transactional reaction and indirect address discharges the ideational meaning of transactional reaction (or simply – people looking at each other) and, instead, charges the interpersonal meaning, resulting in a specific visual identity icon that captures social interactions unfolding within the context of campus life, in both internal and external spaces which are rarely traditional learning environments. This type of visual identity icon is accordingly termed social community. It is essential to recognize that any interaction is social in its essence, and in this context, ‘social’ refers to socializing in a university setting.

A combination of indirect address and (non-)transactional reaction also contribute to constructing portraits of individuals and groups captured at a specific point in time. In such images, attention is drawn to other semiotic inventories, such as body language, facial expressions, and gestures. Together with indirect address, these contribute to capturing ‘unfiltered’ group interactions (3.1 in Table 3) or individuals in a state of pensiveness (3.6 in Table 3) – representations presented for observation and evoking the desire to either become a part of the interaction or aspire to be like a featured individual.

A combination of transitive action and indirect address depicts groups of people as working on a task together, usually with scientific equipment (3.2 in Table 3). Image subjects are presented for observation as they do not make eye contact with the audience. In the process of iconization, a coupling of the ideational meaning (i.e., a group of people working with scientific equipment) and interpersonal meaning (i.e., these people do not make eye contact with the viewer) results in the visual identity icon agentive community emphasizing collaboration and agency in a university context.

A combination of an overt taxonomy and a direct address depicts groups of people posing for photos, celebrating an achievement, albeit in a more static, conceptual way. Ideationally, this kind of representation positions represented participants (i.e., Sub-ordinates) next to each other, naming the achievement verbally through a Superordinate. An example is shown in 3.3 (Table 3), with four human represented participants positioned next to each other and a Superordinate ‘Our highest achieving scholars have recently won the University Medal’ realized verbally. Thus, to understand the occasion of celebration, the audience must also engage with headline mobilized in the image-complex. The ideational meaning of the overt taxonomy (‘four recipients of the award’) coupled with direct address is iconized to construe the identity of community achievers, who were almost always staff and not students. Such depictions were found to utilize long shots, somewhat ‘out of reach’ for the viewer, yet aligned with the viewer through the use of frontal angles.

To summarize, group depictions visually represent the sociality of university life through the inclusion of staff and students. Social relationships between people in images are established either dynamically (reactions and actions) or statically (classifications), with foregrounded experiences of socializing, collaborating, and celebrating achievements. Combined with indirect and direct addresses, the ideational meanings of transactional reactions, transitive actions, and overt classifications are discharged, and the interpersonal meanings that draw on these structures are charged to construe collective identities. The latter contributes to a heightened sense of social presence by foregrounding ‘togetherness’ through the visual identity icons of ‘social community’, ‘agentive community’, and ‘community achievers’. Overall, group identity icons contribute to the construction of collegial, collaborative university culture and collective achievement.

Individual representation: Individuality is celebrated

In images that depict individuals, several visual identity portraits emerge from the couplings of ideational and interpersonal meanings. One type of individual representation depicts a represented participant (Actor) engaged in a transitive action – often doing something with a piece of equipment (Goal) – the example we saw in Figure 2. The Actor is not addressing the audience directly and is instead focused on the object they are holding. The coupling of transitive action and indirect address in individual images construes a visual identity icon of agent, emphasizing autonomy and self-governance of a university member. Dissimilar to the ‘agentive community’ icon, individual agency (and not collaboration) is foregrounded.

Another set of individual depictions presents a single represented participant (Carrier) through an analytical structure. The viewer is invited to examine the attributes of the Carrier (e.g., their clothing and facial expression), and engage with the headline that names the award or competition that the participant took part in. Complemented with direct address, this type of representation construes the visual identity icon of individual achiever, usually depicted at a personal or socio-consultative distance (3.5 in Table 3). This type of representation showcases the individual achievements of the university community members.

The last type of visual identity celebrated in images of individuals features a represented participant (Reacter) engaged in a non-transactional reaction – that is, their gaze is directed at something outside the frame (3.6 in Table 3). The committed interpersonal design choices are those of indirect address and representation power. To rephrase, the image subject does not make eye contact with the viewer who is positioned to ‘look up’ to the represented participant. The coupling of non-transactional reaction, indirect address, and representation power construes the visual identity icon of aspirant. The viewer is invited to imagine/aspire to feel empowered by identifying with the represented participant exerting confidence. The visual choice of a close-up shot is also notable (although complementary) in this kind of identity icon construal and all other individual depictions. Positioning image subjects at a personal or socio-consultative distance tends toward being personizing (Ang & Knox, 2020: 7), inviting the viewer to examine individual features of the image subject and foster the sense of affiliation with them. Having identified the types of identity icons in human photos, both group and individual, we now examine representations of places and abstractions.

Representation of places: University as a physical entity

Images of places, usually campus buildings and campus grounds (Carriers), presented as analytical structures construe the visual identity icon of university as a physical entity. Although this kind of image often includes human represented participants, people are not made salient as they are presented at a public distance and oblique angle (3.7 in Table 3). Human represented participants are depicted as walking and sometimes interacting with their peers, and the viewer is invited to follow vicariously. Public distance and oblique angle thus position the viewer to observe campus life as it unfolds, captured at a point in time. In this way, alongside built environment, human represented participants are depicted as Attributes of the featured place – largely homogenized, with their individuality de-emphasized. This identity icon was particularly prominent in the images of the University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest university founded in 1850. Often coupled with the viewer power (i.e., a high vertical angle), such depictions present bird’s eye view shots where the audience is positioned to examine the campus from above (e.g., Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Bird’s eye view shot of the campus building on the University of Sydney homepage (https://web.archive.org/web/20200927034614; https://www.sydney.edu.au/).

Notably, the ‘real-world’ views of this sort are accessible to only a few members of the university (e.g., people who have the technology and permission to take aerial shots of campus grounds). However, through an engagement with the photographs that depict campus from above, the wider community is given an opportunity to examine the sheer magnitude of the physical university space – shots often marked by a sense of grandeur. By foregrounding architecture, such representations depict university as a physical rather than a metaphorical place, and the audience is positioned to form an affinity with it.

Representation of abstractions: University as an abstract entity

Abstractions of research, science, exploration, and discovery (3.8 in Table 3) are digitally manipulated representations that contribute to the construction of the visual identity icon university as an abstract entity. Although such depictions vary in terms of subject matter, from lines to shapes, color, and symbols, they rely on analytical structures that evoke associations with broader values of higher education such as, for example, research excellence, pursuit of knowledge, and scientific discovery. Some abstractions also couple intermodally (e.g., with the headline, brand color), while others are implicit and presented as symbolic structures for audience interpretation. For example, in Figure 4, a close-up of Athena, a Greek goddess of wisdom, is embellished with various abstractions of discovery, construing an the visual identity icon of the university as a symbolic place of knowledge and learning. The main brand color, hero yellow, reinforces association with the university brand.

Figure 4.

Symbolic abstraction embedded in the brand color ‘hero yellow’ on the UNSW homepage (https://web.archive.org/web/20190430001128; https://www.unsw.edu.au/).

To summarize, there are eight types of visual identity icons in organizational images on university homepages, which draw on several couplings of ideational and interpersonal choices, with varied metafunctional and intermodal commitment. For example, the construal of the individual achiever identity requires a co-deployment of a visual analytical structure (+Carrier; +Attributes), a verbal naming of the award through a headline, and a direct address. In contrast, representation of the university as an abstract entity requires a mobilization of fewer resources – namely, a visual analytical structure representing a concept or an idea. It is observed that allocation of more semiotic resources to identity construction results in a more explicit visual identity icon. Conversely, fewer committed resources indicate a more implicit identity, which is derived from symbolic visual cues complemented with organizational visual identity elements, such as brand color and typefaces. (e.g., Figure 4).

While minor differences in the preferred identity icons for each university were observed, all visual identity icons were featured on each university’s homepage. This observation suggests that universities switch identities based on the rhetorical purposes envisaged for a specific image-complex capturing the university’s diversity as an entity and university life as both an individual and shared experience. Although the list of identified visual identity icons is by no means exhaustive, and variations are expected across different organizational contexts, this work has allowed us to systematize several ways of visual identity construal. It is noteworthy that the universities in the data set prioritize depictions of people, which contributes to augmentation of social presence on their homepages. The next section how social presence is further augmented through the deployment of visual engagement strategies.

Visual strategies for audience engagement

The affective effects of social presence are amplified through several visual design strategies for digital audience engagement which further ‘humanize’ the university brand. Four such strategies have been identified from the analysis of three design factors outlined in Table 1 (i.e., size of the frame, angle of depiction, and gaze). These include proximation, alignment, equalization, and subjectivation. By implementing these strategies, universities position the audiences to relate to the represented participants in several complementary ways to elicit a sense of identification with different communities.

The strategy of proximation is deployed when image subjects are depicted at either a socio-consultative (medium shot) or personal (medium close shot) social distance (Figure 5). In Hall’s (1964) ‘proxemics’, spatial relationships impact human behavior and social interactions. In computer-mediated environments, the size of the frame captures the encoded positioning of the participants of discourse, albeit such interaction lacks reciprocity. Medium and medium close shots (74% of ‘human’ images in the annotated corpus; 218 instances) augment social presence in that they create relatability and human connection. In conjunction with other material properties of an image (e.g., lighting, color, saturation), the strategy of proximation contributes to eliciting social affinity with the depicted individual(s), positioning the audience as part of the representational environment. The design choice of socio-consultative and personal social distance also provides visual context to convey a specific discourse of identity. By curating the visual elements within the frame, particularly people’s expressions, each university foregrounds people’s individuality, enhancing their approachability and invoking positive brand associations.

Figure 5.

Strategy of proximation on the Macquarie University homepage (https://web.archive.org/web/20180622132938; https:/www.mq.edu.au/).

The strategy of alignment is used when image subjects are presented at a frontal angle, inviting involvement with the representational world. A frontal angle (67.8% of ‘human’ images in the annotated corpus; 211 instances) contributes to creating a sense of engagement by positioning the viewer as being welcomed to the life-world shared by (a) represented participant(s) (Figure 6). This strategy is often deployed together with the strategy of proximation, multiplying the visual effects of approachability, authenticity, and personal connection. Similar to a socio-consultative/personal social distance, a frontal angle provides an opportunity to capture and emphasize the facial expressions of the image subject(s), evoking a sense of sincerity and trust. In conjunction with socio-consultative/personal social distance, a frontal angle of depiction puts the represented participants in the spotlight, which reinforces viewer solidarity according to Painter et al. (2013: 137). In this way, the audience is encouraged to relate to people in images as ‘friends’, ‘us’, and ‘part of the community’.

Figure 6.

Strategy of alignment on the UTS homepage (https://web.archive.org/web/20201102044438; https://www.uts.edu.au/).

The strategy of equalization is used to represent image subjects at an eye level, fostering a sense of equality and relatability. An eye-level shot (67% of ‘human’ images in the annotated corpus) promotes a balanced distribution of power and authority, positioning the audience and representation in terms of partnership and egalitarianism while also obfuscating power imbalances associated with low and high angles. More subtly, this choice of angle can create a connection that resonates with the audience’s point of view (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

Strategy of equalization on the Macquarie University homepage (https://web.archive.org/web/20170823144719; http://www.mq.edu.au/).

The strategy of subjectivation often complements the strategies of proximation and alignment and is used to make a symbolic appeal to the audience. Subjectivation is realized through eye contact. Although the direct address (25% of ‘human’ images in the annotated corpus; 70 instances) is less frequent compared to other choices across the systems of social distance, involvement, and power, it has a strong potential for enhancing viewer engagement in two ways. Firstly, in images featuring individuals, visual appeal is amplified by evoking affective responses from the audience. Although other semiotic resources such as verbal text mark the theme of the appeal (e.g., explaining who the individual is and what achievement is being celebrated, as in 3.5 in Table 3), eye contact often expresses a sense of connection and engagement (e.g., Figure 8). Secondly, in group images, eye contact is equally important, but the emotion is shared between the represented participants, and the appeal is that of the ‘togetherness’ of the experience. All group images where the strategy of subjectivation was deployed celebrated the achievements of academic staff and, less frequently, students (e.g., 3.3 in Table 3).

Figure 8.

Strategy of subjectivation on the UNSW homepage (https://web.archive.org/web/20171116063734; https:/www.unsw.edu.au/).

The identified strategies for digital audience engagement – proximation (positioning the viewer as ‘part of’ the scene), alignment (enhancing the viewer engagement through the frontal level of depiction), equalization (representing the participants at an eye-level and positioning the viewer as ‘equal’ with the representation), and subjectivation (positioning the audience to interact with the image subject(s) through gaze) – contribute to enhancing the connection and affiliation with individuals and communities and, ultimately, with the rhetor-institution.

Concluding remarks

When we try to understand the visual identity profiles of universities in the most strategic part of the homepage, we assume that they emerge from a co-deployment of different semiotic resources. While verbal resources play an important role in representing university communities and communicating information about the university structure, degrees, news, and so on, verbal content featured in the viewport appears to be minimal. Instead, images occupy a central stage of the homepage’s real estate, which suggests that universities recognize the value of the image for organizational identity communication. Albeit embedded in the discourse of marketization, the social practice of organizational identity design results in different representations related to individuation, membership, sociality, and place. As a result, no single identity can characterize the visual portrait of the university. Instead, identity is plural and is made up of a combination of visual identity icons reflective of social community, agentive community, community achievers, agent, achiever, aspirant, university as a physical entity, and university as an abstract entity. These identity icons link to the assumed social identity of the digital audience and are presented to foster identification with other university members and the university as a social institution.

While several scholars have highlighted the increasingly marketized nature of university websites (e.g., Jayadeva et al., 2021; Zhang and O’Halloran, 2013), this study focused on the visual nature of identity profiles on university homepages. Instead of critiquing the corporate, customer-centric approaches to education, it aimed to analyze the meaning exchange between the university and the participants of discourse on the homepage, seen as a medium for organizational identity communication. This approach has helped to address organizational culture not by foregrounding customer-centric brand management by rather by developing new knowledge of how images contribute to organizational identity communication. From the array of different approaches to brand management (cf. Heding et al., 2016: 3), the current study contributes to the body of research on branding in higher education that problematizes the adoption of business parlance to higher education (e.g., Naidoo & Jamieson, 2005; Saunders, 2015). As the corporate world continues to impact the landscape of higher education, promotional narratives are unlikely to disappear from the public view. To remain relevant, universities will continue making strategic choices to emphasize their competitive advantage. In this work, I hope to have illustrated how universities realize their identities through images on homepages as one powerful ‘touch point’ (Batey, 2008: 220) for audience engagement.

Another critical touch point for future research is university identity communication on social media. Audience engagement gains a different resonance on social media through platform affordances that invite interaction with the organization and other users. In contrast to the more controlled context of the university websites, where engagement with other community members is impossible, social media constitutes a more interactional environment providing a touch point for various audiences to interact with the university identity in different ways. One example includes a playful TikTok video from UNSW (Figure 9) celebrating both UNSW and the University of Sydney scoring 19th globally in Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World Rankings 2024 after rising more than 20 places in 2023. As of July 5, 2023, the video has attracted over 700,000 views, including ‘Twinning ’comment from the University of Sydney.

Figure 9.

UNSW’s TikTok video celebrating ranking 19th in the QS World Ranking 2024 (https://www.tiktok.com/@unsw/video/7249502379807231239).

Further research on university identities communicated and negotiated on social media would complement the current work and enhance our understanding of the audience contribution to the extension of organizational identity. Of particular interest is how affordances of social media platforms expand the possibilities for co-construal of the meanings of identity in digital environments that allow for more voices in the Bakhtinian sense of heteroglossia (Lam, 2013: 14). Considering social media users as ‘active audiences’ rather than passive receivers or consumers of content (Lievrouw, 2014) provides an opportunity to understand how participants ‘insert’ themselves into discourse, negotiate attitudes, and extend meanings of organizational identity, as for example, though comments and likes in Figure 9.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Professor Louise Ravelli (University of New South Wales) and Associate Professor Mary Angela Bock (University of Texas at Austin) for their valuable comments on the earlier drafts of this paper.

Data availability statement

The annotated data is stored in MAXQDA Analytics Pro software for mixed-method research.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article draws on the author’s PhD thesis work which was funded by the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship (2019–2023).

Permissions

All images from publicly available Australian university websites included in this paper are used under fair dealing provisions for research purposes, in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth).

Notes

Author biography

Nataliia Laba, PhD, is a casual academic in digital and social media at the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney and University of Technology Sydney. Her research interests span socio-technical systems such as websites and, more recently, artificial intelligence from the perspectives of multimodal social semiotics and Science and Technology Studies. Her recent work includes a book chapter on the evolution of organizational identity design on a university homepage, which appeared in the edited volume Organizational Semiotics: Multimodal Perspectives on Organization Studies (Routledge, 2023).

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