Audience style focuses on the way an audience interacts with what they see. Strict informative visual presentations encourage your audience to avoid direct interaction, preferring to pay attention and take in the information. Less formal visual styles communicate an invitation for your audience to participate, laugh or even make comments during your presentation. Subtle visual constructions, such as pictures or informative charts or graphs, support the verbal component of your presentation, providing background information for your audience. An audience-style approach allows you to suggest your audience's level of participation through a visual component.
The transparency of a visual document refers to the qualities it borrows from established, familiar qualities. A visual document formatted with familiar techniques becomes more transparent in your audience's mind, meaning that they see the information you are presenting rather than the format. Unfortunately, transparent styles have difficulties drawing viewers' attention to your visual component. As a result, a more transparent style is ideal for formal presentations, where you can direct attention toward your visual component, and less ideal for advertising situations, where transparency tends to make your advertisement visually avoidable.
Hybridity refers to the way your visual components combine with verbal or textual components of your presentation. This includes the presentation of your visual components and textual components in unique ways, intending to focus your audience's attention to specific points of your presentation. Hybridity is an important element of Internet communication used by websites to draw a user's attention to specific advertisements or textual elements. For instance, when creating a website, you focus on the hybridity of your site as you ask what font style to use, where to place pictures and how your overall placement draws your users' attention to your Web page.
As a visual communicator, you communicate your intentions for how you intend others to use your visual component by using each of these styles. Taken together, you suggest the level of participation you want from your audience, while directing their focus toward specific places in your visual display. Websites, advertisements and project displays use all of these style components to relate information to an audience.