Graphic design

graphic design in theory and practice

graphic design in theory and practice

Understanding Comics

July 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the techniques, philosophy, and interpretation of comics

Whenever there is a discussion or an exchange of messages concerning comics or visual narratives, one name crops up again and again – Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics is his now classic work on the comic designer’s art. It’s presented in the form of a comic itself – but don’t let that fool you. He could just as easily given his book the sub-title ‘The Philosophy of Graphic Narratives’. He starts with a chapter defining what comics are (sequential visual art) and shows something of their history, going back as far as Egyptian wall paintings in 1300 BC.

If at first this seems rather obvious or over-simplified, two or three pages into chapter two, he is discussing the theory of visual perception and the nature of iconic language. Next comes the sequencing of action and the decision of what goes into (and what can be left out of) each visual panel of a comic. There’s a very interesting comparison of American and Japanese techniques in which he argues that some of the special effects of the Manga comics arise from different traditions of perception in the East.

He explains the depiction of time and motion via the panel or frame. In fact after doing the same thing for emotion by the use of symbols, he extends his argument to claim that we are in an age where a whole new visual language is in the process of being invented.

The traditional modes of dealing with narrative via showing and telling are demonstrated by the same story being related via pictures and words, then re-combined to show the comic creator’s skill in offsetting one medium against the other to avoid tautology and maximise expressive density.

This is a book which will entrance any comic lovers or anybody who has an interest in media studies or how ideas and stories are transmitted.

Quite a lot of these issues of graphics, narrative, point of view, and are now an active part of online, web-based information. I’m sure he will be aware of that, and I’m sure he will take it into account in any future editions.

He ends with what is obviously a heartfelt plea that comics should be taken seriously as a cultural genre, and he extends this to claim that they haven’t yet even scratched the surface of what they are capable of expressing.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Scott McCLoud, Understanding Comics, New York: HarperCollins, 1994, pp.217, ISBN 006097625X

More on art
More on media
More on design

Visual Explanations

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling illustrated essays on presenting information

Visual Explanations is Edward Tufte’s passionate manifesto for intelligent information design. He is concerned with the need for scale, accuracy, and truthful proportion in the visualisation of data. The book derives much of its charm from the beautiful reproduction of its illustrative materials. He includes engravings, photographs, maps, computer-generated images, and even built-in flaps showing motion and before-after effects. The diversity of his examples is just as impressive.

Clarity and excellence in thinking is very much like clarity and excellence in the display of data. When principles of design replicate principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight.

They are drawn from scientific papers, conjurors’ manuals, and even books designed to be read under water. In one stunning example, he uses video snapshots of his own two-dimensional yet dynamic visualisation of a thunderstorm. Tufte [pronounced “TUFF-tee”] makes his central argument in a chapter which has now become famous.

This discusses the mis-representation of data related to the 1986 Challenger space shuttle which resulted in a disastrous explosion and the death of all the cosmonauts on board. His dense technical analysis of data-presentation and bad practice is used to argue that the fatal accident could have been averted if charts and diagrams had been presented more intelligently, more accurately.

A chapter on conjuring tricks focuses on the clever representation of temporal progression in single illustrations from how-to-do-it books. However, it has to be said that sometimes it’s not quite clear what point he’s making, and he seems to be struggling with what is obvious: that it’s difficult to represent fluid motion in static, two-dimensional images.

Eventually it emerges that he wishes to compare magic with it’s opposite – teaching. One amazes by concealment, the other should inform by revelation. “Your audience should know beforehand what you’re going to do.” That’s a useful insight for some of us.

His attitude is enormously confident and persuasive. Yet if you can brace yourself as a reader, it sometimes seems that he doesn’t always follow his own theories in the presentation of materials – and this in a book which he wrote, designed, and published himself. On some pages, it’s difficult to link illustration to argument; some reproductions are disproportionately large for the point they are making; and he pursues the odd habit of crowding the generous page margins with bibliographic minutiae which would normally be reserved for chapter endnotes.

He writes in a cryptic, elliptical manner, and is much given to compressed generalisations and gnomic claims such as “to make verbs visible, is at the heart of information design” – though this approach can also be quite witty, as when he dismisses one of the bad examples as “better than nothing ([but] that’s all it’s better than”.

Despite these occasional oddities, there are thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. For instance, the idea that the public health warnings on US billboard cigarette advertisements are less effective because they are difficult to read, crammed as they are into boxed text, sans-serif fonts, in continuous capitals, and underlined – which makes four typographical solecisms in one.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: SMOKING CAUSES LUNG CANCER, HEART DISEASE, EMPHYSEMA, AND MAY COMPLICATE PREGNANCY.

Despite the graphic variety of his presentations, many of his arguments are amazingly orchestrated onto single or double-page spreads, and the book is an almost irresistibly beautiful production. What he’s actually talking about is visual rhetoric: “by establishing a structure of rhythm and relationships, [graphic] parallelism becomes the poetry of visual information”. We might wish to query some of his theoretical claims, but it’s very hard to be critically detached from such a seductive presentation of evidence – which paradoxically is the very point he’s warning us about.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997, pp.156, ISBN: 0961392126

More on information design
More on technology
More on digital media

Web Design: Tools and Techniques

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

design with emphasis on graphics and advanced effects

This is the second edition of a very successful Web design manual. It spells out the basics of good design, but then concentrates on the graphic design elements of building good pages and effective sites. Peter Kentie begins by outlining the principles of HTML and Web design. Then he explains the basics of coding – starting from text and graphics, then forms and tables, frames and style sheets. Those who wish to take the route of using a text editor will be glad to know that he discusses Front Page, HotMetal, BBEdit, PageMaker, and even Word. The later two thirds of the book are taken up with what is obviously his forte – ‘creative Web design’.

This involves using intermediate graphics techniques and ‘advanced’ multimedia effects such as Flash, sound, video, 3-D, and Java Programming. All of which makes it very much a book which will appeal to graphic designers. He deals with colour adjustment, Gif and Jpg image manipulation, background effects, image maps, shadows, and 3-D effects. There’s lots of use of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as the Macromedia Web tool programs.

The advanced section deals with making animated Gifs. He’s very enthusiastic about Flash, which allows you to create animations which are amazingly small in terms of file size. And if you feel very adventurous, you can even try his suggestions for Shockwave movies, Virtual Reality, or streaming video. He ends with the advanced possibilities now possible using XML, WAP, Java, and Active Server Pages.

These effects are explained clearly but quickly – so this book is most suitable for intermediate users. I think it will be most useful for those people with an existing web site who want to improve and develop it using the latest technologies. Those who are in the beginner stages of web design should try checking out a free website at webstarts.com. The book is very elegantly produced, and packed with both coding and screen shots, showing you what can be done.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Peter Kentie, Web Design: Tools and Techniques, Berkeley (CA) Pearson/Peachpit Press, (second edition) 2002, pp.485, ISBN: 0201717123

More on design
More on media
More on web design

Wordless Books

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the original graphic novels

Wood engravings, linocuts, and, copperplate engravings have all existed for centuries, but it wasn’t until the early years of the 1900s that artists began to use them for creating book-length ‘stories without words’ which aspired to be the equivalent of novels. These are what we now call graphic novels. These illustrators were closely associated with the visual world of German expressionism, particularly that of Oskar Kokoshka and Ernst Kirchner. The two most prominent figures in this movement were Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, though David Berona, in this thoughtful and well-informed work of homage to the genre also includes examples by Otto Nuckell, and the more recent Willam Gropper, the American Milt Gross, Giacomo Patri, and Laurence Hyde.

He quotes the celebrated comic-book theorist Scott McCloud as observing that these woodcut stories were an important bridge between the nineteenth century and the modern day comic. He includes extracts from a number of Masereel’s wordless books – almost all of them dealing with the de-humanising effect of capitalism on the common man. His best-known work, The Passionate Journey (1919) was the nearest Masereel came to creating a novel in pictures – a story of Everyman at the start of the last century. It’s a tale very close in both substance and mood to Doblin’s later Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).

Berona gives an account of Masereel’s other wordless novels, illustrating their somber black and white pages and describing their stories. He doesn’t go in for any profound analysis, which given the youthfulness of this art form at the time might even be a good thing.

The American artist Lynd Ward actually used the graphic novel form to explore issues of slavery and race in US culture, as well as the oppression that common people felt as a result of the Great Depression.

It has to be said that many of these ‘novels’ are often not much more than extended adolescent fantasies of the kind that are thrown up time and again in ‘creative writing’ classes. But what makes them very different is that they are executed dramatically and with visual finesse via these authors’ control of a two-dimensional visual medium.

It’s a world of tilting skyscrapers, menacing shadows, vertiginous perspectives, drink and debauchery, children born out of wedlock, and people set against sunrises with outstretched arms.

Almost all of these illustrators were on the side of the small, common man, and against the might of the capitalist, the owners of the means of production.

Some of the later examples, produced in the late 1920s and 1930s by American artists such as Milt Gross and Myron Waldman are very close to the comic book tradition which was emerging around the same time.

There are also lots of original book jacket covers reproduced here, as well as fully documented details of the artists, their works, and other publications related to this neglected niche of visual narratives.

It’s strange to note that apart from minor differences which arose from working with wood, lino, or even lead, the styles adopted by these artists were all remarkably similar. The graphic novel is now a thriving genre in its own right, with many distinguished illustrators working in the medium. But this is a valuable collection of the work of pioneers.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

David A. Berona, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels, New York: Abrams, 2008, pp.255, ISBN: 0810994690

More on design
More on media
More on web design

Writing: Urban Calligraphy

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

hand drawn type on walls – contemporary trends

Those kids who spray graffiti on the sides of trains and motorway underpasses sometimes take their graphic inventiveness to amazing lengths. I’ve often admired the way they distort letter-forms into chubby round-shouldered block caps running into each other and overlapping so much that a name becomes more like a logo. Markus Mai’s Writing: Urban Calligraphy and Beyond explains the aims of these ‘writers’ as they call themselves – but he also goes on to show how the more creative of them turn their typographic designs into works of abstract sculpture.

Well, not quite abstract, because some of the more inventive actually become a three-dimensional typography.’Writing’ is the general term given by these spay painters to the graffiti, signatures, and logos they create. It’s an activity which has gone from illegal defacement of walls and railway carriages into the legitimate world of fashion houses. Agnes B and Calvin Klein now employ these former vandals as calligraphic designers.

The chapters of Mai’s fascinating book are organised in ascending order of complexity. First come the ‘tags’, the personalised name design which is shaped into a distinctive logo. Next come fully fledged alphabets which demonstrate the remarkable typographic skills of these felt tip artists. There are alphabets which are almost unrecognisable yet curiously beautiful.

Many of them produce letter forms which are distorted and elaborated so much that you would hardly recognise them as letter forms at all unless they were seen alongside others from the alphabet.

A major influence clearly visible is Asian and Islamic art. Many of the forms of urban graffiti look just like the elements of classical Arabic scripts. It’s logical enough in a culture which puts emphasis on typography and bans realistic representation. Yet it’s difficult to believe that the kids in trainers and baseball caps who spray rolling stock and motorway underpasses spend their time studying the Koran. Yet the influence must come from somewhere.

The most amazing examples in this handsomely illustrated study are single letters viewed from several perspectives, and it’s interesting to note that no matter how far the process of abstraction is pursued, the results always somehow retain an organic form. It’s as if the typographic and the human share some basic genetic material. And that’s all the more so since the same phenomenon is apparent in the case of Latinate, Arabic, or Asian scripts.

Next comes the fleshing out of these letter forms into another dimension. Shading and perspective are added, and the logos start jumping off the garage walls and the elevator doorways. But as this move towards abstraction and an extra dimension continues, the jumbles of letters begin to take on an architectural appearance. They become like abstract structures.

The next stage is the logical development of this process. The letter forms are actually realised as three dimensional objects in their own right. The graffiti ‘writers’ seem to be influenced by both architecture and organic forms, so it is no surprise that some of their more advanced work is realised in the form of abstract sculptures and three 3-D ‘objects’. Many of these are shown taking their place quite logically in art galleries or as public installations.

There’s also an element of socio-political activism at work her – but it’s not that important. What really counts is the stunning depth of invention in the designs illustrated, and the admirable presentation values of the book itself.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Markus Mai, Writing: Urban Calligraphy and Beyond, Berlin: Die Gestallten Verlag, 2005, pp.207, ISBN: 3899550625

More on typography
More on design
More on media
More on web design

Graphic design

graphic design in theory and practice

the techniques, philosophy, and interpretation of comics

best-selling illustrated essays on presenting information

design with emphasis on graphics and advanced effects

the original graphic novels

hand drawn type on walls – contemporary trends

Get in touch