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.