Why are the CRAP principles important in design?

• Robin Williams is the go to person for introductory graphic design information, mostly because of her easy to understand CRAP principles.  So why are they so important?  Well, the principles themselves aren't that important, I think anyone who is a good designer would naturally tend to do the things she suggests.  However, the way she presents them is easy to understand and by making a few minor changes to a flyer, business card or poster by following her rules, anyone can make a better ad or business card.  Contrast, repitition, alignment and proximity are things that anyone can understand and fix, and voila, anyone can become an amateur graphic designer.  Most of the examples in her book can be created in a word document, so I think part of the reason her principles are important is once again accesibility and usability, the same thing that's important in any rhetorical device.  Williams' advice is for the regular person and doesn't require special knowledge of InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator or Dreamweaver to follow it.  Considering repetition, alignment, proximity and especially contrast can quickly make a design look way better and lead the viewer's eye through the page, just like any good piece of art!  I feel like Robin Williams' design principles are a good starting point for design, but that's pretty much what they are:  some simple rules that can make any design a little bit better under most conditions.  Of course I think the most important thing is that you are completely happy with anything you design, and I think the CRAP principles are just like any other rules-good most of the time, but every one in a while it's ok for them to be broken.

How does McCloud view comics as visually rhetorical?

I think McCloud views comics as visually rhetorical because there was a section where he discusses how art and pictures are judged using completely separate standards.  In a given comic, the visuals can be more important, less important or equally important to the words.  I was also given the impression during the reading that most people writing a comic would try to make both the words and pictures necessary so the reader pays attention to both parts.  This section was effective, but I felt like in the rest of the reading I hardly looked at the pictures at all except for where pictures were being used as an example, making the pictures unnecessary for much of what he was trying to say.  I also thought it was interesting that he said both "a huge range of human experiences can be portrayed in comics through either words or pictures" as well as "comics have become firmly identified with the art of storytelling."  Both these points made me think more about comics and their effectiveness.  I think that (sometimes) for someone to fully understand a concept, you need words and pictures for them to fully understand what you're trying to tell them.  Assuming people think that visuals are rhetorical in many cases, then it also seems to me that by containing pictures alone comics would be considered visually rhetorical.  All in all, I feel like McCloud's overall point was that comics can be very effective because they contain both words and pictures and that both of them combine to make a stronger rhetorical statement than many other forms of multimedia.