Objectives

2. Objectives • Learn the considerations of content, medium, and mode/style • Understand how visuals are classified • Integrate type and visuals • Appreciate modes of visualization and expression • Examine the basics of visualizing form

3. Definitions • Visuals is a broad term encompassing many kinds of representational, abstract, or nonobjective depictions—photographs, illustrations, drawings, paintings, prints, graphic elements and marks, and elemental images such as pictograms, signs, or symbols; visuals are also called images. • An approach is a look, manner, tone, style, or any appearance used to communicate or connote meaning. Some approaches are retro, psychedelic, funk, primitive, childlike, grunge, surreal, high-tech, homemade, new wave, futuristic.

4. Visualization and Composition • Often, steps in the process of conceptualization, visualization, and composition can happen simultaneously or with great overlap, with back and forth, modifying a concept as you make discoveries while visualizing. • Undoubtedly, you will find your preliminary decisions are subject to change during the course of visualization. • You may find your initial impulse overridden by intuition during the process, by a critique, by practical matters related to image quality, time, budget, by a happy accident that altered your thinking, or by any number of factors.

5. Considerations of Content,Medium, and Mode • After you generate a concept, you make preliminary decisions about content, medium, and mode. • Content: Required text + visual components • Media and Methods: How the component parts will be created, rendered, and displayed on screen or in print. • Mode of Visualization and/or Style: A mode of visualization is how you will render and execute the visuals and type for a project, including decisions about the qualities and characteristics of the form.

6. About Visuals • Classifying visuals and how to depict them helps you understand the range and potential of visuals to communicate. • Classifications include: • Notation – Contour • Pictograph – Light and Shadow • Silhouette – Naturalistic • Linear – Expressionistic CLASSIFICATION OF IMAGES

7. Depictions • There are three basic classifications of depiction as they directly refer to and then move away from what we see in nature • Representational • Abstraction • Nonobjective THREE BASIC CLASSIFICATIONS OF DEPICTION

8. Signs and Symbols • From the theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, we get a classification of signs—what they mean and how they are used in graphic design. • Sign • Icon • Index • Symbol SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

9. Use of Signs and Symbols • Signs and symbols serve many functions and purposes in graphic design, whether as a stand-alone image, or most often as components of a design solution. • Today, so much information must be universally understood, crossing language and cultural barriers. • Signs or icons in the form of pictograms serve this purpose wonderfully; they are purely visual, nonverbal communication. THE TALK CHART: CHART THE DESIGN STUDIO AT KEAN UNIVERSITY

10. Types of Images and Image Making • Imagery is either created by the designer, commissioned from an illustrator or photographer, selected by the designer from among stock imagery or the client’s archives, or found by the designer (to be discussed in this chapter). • Visuals can be created using a multitude of tools and media. • When you create your own image, you are in control; you decide what goes into the image or scene. • When you select an image, you either accept the image as is—as someone else conceived it, visualized, and composed it—or alter it, assuming the stock image provides rights for such alterations.

11. Types of Images and Image Making • The following list explains broad categories of producing and creating images: • Illustration • Photography • Graphic interpretation • Collage • Photomontage • Mixed media • Motion graphics • Diagram GRAPHIC INTERPRETATION

12. More on Visualization:Approach and Connotation • Designers may choose an approach—a look, manner, tone, style, or any appearance—to communicate or connote meaning. • Some approaches are: • Retro – Surreal • Psychedelic – High-tech • Funk – Homemade • Primitive – New Wave • Childlike – Futuristic • Grunge • Historical Periods and Connotation: • Studying the history of graphic design affords one an understanding of how style communicates a period and the spirit of an age—the zeitgeist

13. Selecting Images / Image Manipulation • When a budget does not allow for commissioning an illustrator or photographer, you can turn to available archives of preexisting illustrations or photographs • Image making also involves manipulation. A common decision a designer must make is whether to use a visual as is or change it—manipulate it. • Image manipulation includes: • Alteration • Exaggeration • Economy • Combination • Deliberated camera angle and viewpoint

14. Presentation • How you present a visual affects communication. • Will you crop it? Bleed it? Isolate it? Juxtapose it? Frame it? How will the visual be presented on the page? • Matters include: • Margins • Rules • Borders • Cropping • Bleed or full bleed PRESENTATION

15. Integrating Type and Visuals • When type and visuals interact, then you have to determine how they will interact. • To best explain visual/type integration, it can be broken up into three categories: • Supporting partner: a classic “neutral” typeface works cooperatively with the visual as the “star.”(This is, by far, the biggest category.) • Sympathetic type and visual relationships.(This is the next biggest category.) • Contrasting type and visual relationships.(This is an under-utilized category.)

16. Integrating Type and Visuals:Supporting Partner • For the sake of clarity and visual interest, the tendency is to allow either type or visual(s) to be the star, hero, or heavy lifter, with the other component acting in a more neutral fashion, like a supporting actor. • In a design, type might be the well-chosen, sterile, blank slate, and the visual “furnishes the room.” SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN: BOOK COVER JOHN GALL

17. Integrating Type and Visuals:Sympathetic • Type and visuals possess shared or similar qualities and characteristics, and the resulting harmonious agreement communicates or enhances meaning, or type and visuals share apparent thematic character and purpose. • Congruence relies on agreement in shape, form, proportions, weights, widths, thin/thick strokes, lines, textures, positive and negative shapes, and historical period. • Again, it must be understood that even though visual/verbal components share characteristics, there is the hierarchic strategy that one component— either type or visual—is the star, possessing the most visual interest, and the other is more neutral to support the one doing the heavy lifting.

18. Integrating Type and Visuals:Contrast • Type and visuals possess apparent differences, contrasting points of differentiation, contrasting or opposing qualities and characteristics that become interdependent to produce an effect only when present together. • There are two basic ways in which type and visuals work in contrast: complementary relationship or a formal ironic relationship. A CIRCULAR UNIVERSE: COVER MIKE PERRY

19. Integrating Type and Visuals:Contrast • Complementary Relationship • Typefaces or hand-drawn type are chosen to work in opposition to or in juxtaposition to visuals, relying on contrasts in shape, form, proportions, weights, widths, thin/thick strokes, lines, textures, positive and negative shapes—for example, geometric versus organic, elegant versus rough, refined versus sloppy, detailed versus loosely rendered (such as a detailed linear illustration contrasted with freely-drawn type). MINNESOTA MOTORCYCLE SAFETY CENTER: AD CAMPAIGN MARTIN/WILLIAMS INC., MINNEAPOLIS

20. Integrating Type and Visuals:Contrast • This doesn’t mean the type, or text for that matter, is given a diminutive role; rather it means the type simultaneously contextualizes the image and by its understatement bestows celebrity status to the image while being noble itself. GROUND: LOGO VISUAL DIALOGUE, BOSTON

21. Integrating Type and Visuals:Contrast • Formal Ironic Relationship • Typeface and visual are chosen for incongruity, for an ironic effect CATCH OF THE DAY: POSTER JOE SCORSONE/ALICE DRUEDING, JENKINTOWN, PA

22. Visualization Modes • In the visual arts, there are theories on modes of visualization and their respective meanings. • A linear mode is characterized by a predominant use of lines to describe forms or shapes within a composition. • In graphic design, painterly modes are characterized by the use of color and value to describe shapes and forms, relying on visible, broad, or sketchy description of form rather than the specificity of lines. • In this context, unity means forms that seem to merge, where edges are blurred as in a painterly style. • In multiplicity, individual shapes or forms maintain a certain amount of independence from one another

23. Proximate and Distant Vision • All images are rendered in focus and in detail in proximate vision regardless of whether they are located near or far in space. • In distant vision, the effect of the atmosphere between the artist’s (and viewer’s) vision and the thing seen is in evidence.

24. Basics of Visualizing Form • Examining basic methods of describing form is important for visualization. How you describe form affects communication and expression. • Sharpness vs. Diffusion • Accuracy vs. Distortion • Economy vs. Intricacy • Subtle vs. Bold • Predictable vs. Spontaneous • Opaque vs. Transparent • Hard Edge vs. Brushy CIAO BELLA: PACKAGE DESIGN WALLACE CHURCH, NEW YORK

25. A Final Word on Visualization:Storytelling • Every image tells a story through its subject, visualization, and composition. • And every aspect of that image—color, light and shadow, details, angle/point of view, value contrast—all contribute to the nature of the story: what you leave in an image, what you edit out—how you frame it, whether you crop it, and so on.

26. Summary • Visualization and composition are driven by a design concept—by its intended purpose, its audience, its function, as well as what form it will take (format, media, scope). • How you visualize and compose your concept hinges on what you want say, to whom you are saying it, and with what connotation. • After you generate a concept, you make preliminary decisions about content, medium, and mode. • Graphic designers work with two main components: type and visuals.

27. Summary • Visuals is a broad term encompassing many kinds of representational, abstract, or nonobjective depictions—photographs, illustrations, drawings, paintings, prints, graphic elements and marks, and elemental images such as pictograms, signs, or symbols; visuals are also called images. • Visuals can be classified as notation, pictographs, silhouettes, linear, contours, light and shadow, naturalistic, or expressionistic. • The three basic classifications of depiction are representational, abstract, and nonobjective. • From the theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, we get a classification of signs, including sign, icon, index, symbol, and metasymbol.

28. Summary • Basic types of image making include illustration, photography, graphic representation, collage, photomontage, mixed media, motion graphics, and diagrams. • “As designers we therefore need to understand the impact that images have and the ways in which we can manipulate and present them to achieve our goals.”—Professor Alan Robbins • A common decision a designer must make is whether to use a visual as is or change it—manipulate it. • How you present a visual affects communication, including margins, rules, borders, cropping, and bleeds.

29. Summary • Be aware of intellectual property rights concerning images created by others. • When integrating type and visuals, most designers create supporting relationships, sympathetic relationships, or contrasting relationships. • Modes of visualization include linear and painterly; proximate vision versus distant vision; sharpness versus diffusion; accuracy versus distortion; economy versus intricacy; subtle versus bold; predictable versus spontaneous; opaque versus transparent.