One of the things that I really liked about Multimodality was that Kress talks about meaning being made through the interplay of the author and interpreter. (I'm having trouble remembering back to the beginning of the semester, but...) It seems like most of our readings have given the agency to the interpreter when it comes to meaning making. While I agree that, especially with visuals, the scales would be tipped toward the interpreter, I liked that Kress gave a "shout out" to the author. Without the author's socially-informed manipulation of his/her available modes, the interpreter would be able to exercise his/her socially-informed making of meaning.
More than Kress' author/interpreter interplay though, I liked his idea of affordances. Before reading Kress (who I first read a couple of years ago), I had never really thought about affordances. I'm sure I had thought about things that could be done through text that couldn't be done through visuals—and vice versa—but I hadn't thought about each mode having their own sets of advantages and disadvantages. I like that thinking about the affordances of different modes establishes a kind equilibrium among them. It seems like many people (outside the fields of semiotics and rhet/comp), want to establish some kind of universal/static hierarchy of modes, but thinking about affordances allows us to say "X mode is good in this situation, while Y mode is good in that situation.
Outside of the theoretical aspects of Kress, I both liked and disliked his multitude of examples. In many cases I was glad that he was making sure that I/we understood what he was talking about, but there were other times when I was like "Gunther, I get it! Give me a break with these examples."
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