Didn’t realize I was plagarizing Scott McCloud with the brain-to-brain image in the bottom right of my previous comics/information design mind map. Guess it’s one of those things that drills itself into your subconcious…
THE SPIEL THAT BRINGS THE SUCKERS INTO THE TENT
I’m currently slogging my way through Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, much of which I, like the academic film dope in Annie Hall, don’t understand at all. What better way to celebrate our favorite TV night (Prison Break, 24) than by quoting from the introduction:
McLuhan notices, correctly, that it is the bad news-reports of sexual scandal, natural disaster, and violent death-that sells the good news-that is, the advertisements. The bad news is the spiel that brings the suckers into the tent. Like the illustrations in a fifth-grade reader, the sequence of scenes on CBS or CNN teaches the late-twentieth-century American catechism: first, at the top of the news, the admonitory row of body bags being loaded into ambulances in Brooklyn or south Miami; second, the inferno of tenement fires and bumming warehouses; third, a sullen procession of criminals arraigned for robbery or murder and led away in chains. The text of the day’s lesson having been thus established, the camera makes its happy return to the always smiling anchorwoman, and so-with her gracious permission-to the previews of heaven sponsored by Delta Airlines, Calvin Klein, and the State Farm Insurance companies. The homily is as plain as a medieval morality play or the bloodstains on Don Johnson’s Armani suit–0bey the law, pay your taxes, speak politely to the police officer, and you go to the Virgin Islands on the American Express card. Disobey the law, neglect your insurance payments, speak rudely to the police, and you go to Kings County Hospital in a body bag.
WiiMANIA!
After 23 years, I finally own a Nintendo. By sheer dumb luck yesterday, I checked Target.com and saw that there were Wiis in stock 5 miles from where I work. Drove right over after work, got the second to last in stock. Brought it home, and the wife and I played Wii sports for the rest of the night. (I would post a YouTube video of her boxing, but I think she might divorce me…)
Review: believe the hype. It’s sleek, intuitive, and amazingly fun. Worth every penny so far. (And we don’t even have Zelda yet.)
Add to that, the remote feels totally revolutionary. The closer we move towards touch and motion, and the further we move away from keyboard and mice, the better computer interfaces are going to get. Check out this unbelievable video of a multi-touch driven computer screen, posted by Peter Durand. The future, people.
And let’s not forget the importance of play. “It’s through playing that children learn, among other things, skills essential to thriving in and protecting democratic society — critical thinking, initiative, problem solving and empathy.”
Thank God we’ve found a diversion from February in Mordor — err, Cleveland. Because it’s coming…
COMICS & INFORMATION DESIGN, PT. 3: BUT IS IT ART?
Something to consider:
“What is art not? Well, as I’ve described it, Art is not about communication. Art is not a way of conveying information. It’s a way of understanding information. That is, creating a work of art is a means we have of making sense of the world, focusing to make it clearer, not a way of communicating some understanding of the world that we already hold. If you already hold a clear understanding of whatever then there’s no reason to create the work of art. So you don’t. In fact, you can’t. If you are trying to demonstrate some fact pictorially this is called illustration. Illustration is superficial, no matter how skilled, because it is secondary. The idea comes first and the illustration explicates it.”
– James Kochalka, “The Horrible Truth About Comics,” in THE CUTE MANIFESTO
COMICS & INFORMATION DESIGN, PT. 2: SYNTAX VS. STYLE
“The cartoon style is sometimes good in explaining things; the words are right there with the illustration, complete text-image integration produced by the same hand behind both text and image. And the mind behind that hand has to have a good understanding of the content–usually–in order to produce the narrative illustrations. Of course readers don’t expect to see original scientific evidence reported cartoon-style; the cartoon style for serious evidence would compromise the credibility of the report.”
– Edward Tufte, Ask E.T. forum
* * *
It seems that most discussion about comics done by information designers is about the merits of the cartoon style — corporations using cartoons for training manuals or teachers using comics to appeal to teenagers, for example — than about the merits of what Tufte calls “the underlying syntax of comics.” Let us remember, by way of McCloud, that comics is a form, not a style — comics can look like The Gates of Paradise, or they can look like Marmaduke.
I like the word “syntax.” Comics is a language, with its own grammar, it’s own “patterned relations,” arrangements, and structures. Comics is also a type of special reading. So yes, it is true that information design can learn from cartooning’s “unity of style,” but what can it learn from, for example, the juxtaposition of “voiceover” narration with images and dialogue? What about recursive narration? What can we learn about reading and flow?
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