The visual is an important mode of communication, the study of which makes the interpretation, and meaning-making of the world around us very important and robust. The in-depth study of the role played by visuals has recently attracted the attention of scholars in different ways. Since everything around us is directly or indirectly related to language, meaning-making becomes an important social and language activity for the linguist, professional communicator and even the unlettered person on the street to ponder on. A viewer/reader may not know what attracts him/her to an image but the linguist/semiotist knows and if well equipped with the necessary linguistic or semiotic tools, can also describe not only the physical features, but also the interpersonal, textual and compositional metafunctions of the representational participants in an image. It is with this background that this paper examines what it takes to do visual analysis of still images, and in particular billboards.
Armed with Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) theory in Reading Images and Harrison’s (2003) framework on how to understand still images, this paper attempts the analysis of the visual grammar of a billboard advertisement of a popular alcoholic beverage in Nigeria.