MODES OF APPEAL: ETHOS

Below: The Original & The New
The original piece titled "Christmas Greetings" was designed by Clarence Coles Phillips for the December 2, 1909 issue of LIFE magazine. It was one of the many Holiday issues this LIFE magazine did. I decided to classify this piece as Pathos because of the following: the body language, the direction she is facing, and the action of placing a letter home for the holidays. All of these allude to the sensitive nature of Christmas time.

As a result of that decision, I had the options of pursuing a Logos or Ethos mode of appeal for my project. With the Logos approach, how I understood it is by using factual information and visual diagrams to describe/show something. For the Ethos appeal, I understood it as explaining/referencing/backing up an idea with a credible source. From these understandings, I favored Logos and wanted to depict a couple factual, very intriguing facts...that even I did not know. (Over 1.76 billion candy canes are made each year). As for Ethos, I also used the facts to drive my ideas in coming up with 2 thoughts. (Christmas trees are an All-American product | An estimated 175,000 Christmas trees are sold via e-commerce each year).



After working through those ideas, I ended up with the Ethos mode of appeal. The concept behind my LIFE magazine cover deals with Holiday shopping and how technology has changed the way we do that action. I use the computer as a credible visual source for using the internet to shop and purchase not only gifts, but other holiday musts (candy canes, Christmas trees, etc) I created the artwork in the browser and showed the action of "adding an item to the cart" for purchase. I then positioned it on my computer and photographed it. From there I brought it into photoshop and applied this green look to it to further insist on the Holiday (red/green) issue. By adding the headline "Digitizing how we do gifting", it references the technological aspect and the action of buying gifts/gift giving.

Below are some older issues I found as well as some other photographs with mine in context with other issues.