rhetoric in graphic design

According to El Mundo, this is how Venezuelan TV channel VTV...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:47:00 +0200

According to El Mundo, this is how Venezuelan TV channel VTV depicted the results of this weekend’s presidential elections. Nicolás Maduro, successor of recently deceased Hugo Chávez, won against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles by an incredibly small margin (50,66% against 49,77%), but VTV’s understanding of percentages and graphics is somewhat unique… It seems a landslide victory is only a matter of point of view…

Farewell to Chavez

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:27:00 +0100

Earlier this week, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez passed away after a long battle with cancer. A controversial political figure, Chavez has been idolized and hated, being called from “hero to the poor” to “tyrannical dictator”. The photographs used to illustrate the news of his passing in first pages of newspapers across the world reflect this multi-sided image of Chavez.

A tender approach was the use of pictures of him in farewell gestures. Ecuador’s Hoy and Peru’s Perú 21 showed Chavez in an introspective military salute, evocative of leadership and respect.

Brazil’s O Estado de S. Paulo shows Chavez waving at a crowd, evoking his popularity. Spain’s Diario de Burgos chose the initial moment of a blowing kiss, showing an affectionate and familiar attitude.

Colombia’s El Espectador went further, picturing a warm self-embrace, symbolizing a farewell embrace between Chavez and his nation. From Venezuela itself, El Nacional shows a joyful wave, followed by a picture of his people in despair.

Pictures of desolated Venezuelans suggest that Chavez was a deeply beloved leader, who will be missed by his people. USA’s Hoy and La Opinión, Brazil’s O Globo and Argentina’s La Nación and Spain’s El Día pictured people crying, some holding posters with Chavez’s face.

The use of posters with his face on it is evocative of his strong iconic figure. It shows Chavez, but indirectly, that is, the photograph of a photograph of him. He is therefore showed not as a person, but as an icon. Spain’s Granada Hoy shows a photograph of a vice-president Nicolas Maduro standing in front of a giant portrait of Chavez, while a man in uniform stares at Chavez ceremoniously.

His iconic figure is also alluded to in photographs of him not facing the camera, but instead staring into the distance, such as in Colombia’s El Colombiano, Argentina’s Clarín, Spain’s El País and Brazil’s Zero Hora.

Brazil’s Folha de S. Paulo shows a photograph of Chavez raising his fist to an unseen audience, with a picture of Che Guevarra behind him. The image suggests a connection between the two South-American leaders, transferring some of Che’s strongly symbolic power to Chavez.

Brazil’s Estado de Minas pictures a silhouette of Chavez, which carries at least two strong messages: a) he is so iconic that one doesn’t even need to see his face to recognize him; and b) the black shape of his head represents the shadow of Chavez that Venezuela might have to deal with from now on.

Portugal’s Público and Diário de Notícias and Italy’s La Stampa show the same photograph of Chavez fading into the darkness. It might allude to both the fading of the man, slowly consumed by cancer, and the darkness of his government, strongly criticized for its censorship measures against Venezuela’s press.

Colombia’s Q’Hub decided to go for the shock value, depicting a bald Chavez and the headline “Cancer has beaten him” in big bold capital letters, making the page about the disease instead of the man.

Obamacare's front pages

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 15:36:40 +0200

United States’ president Barack Obama had his health care plan upheld by the US Supreme Court this week, and that made headlines in yesterday’s front pages all over the country.

The Iowa City Press-Citizen showed a lifeline image along with the headline “What’s Next?”, a symbol for tension and anxiety, emphasizing the feeling of uneasiness and doubt.

The Home News Tribune focused on the partisanship of the issue, without any subtetly.

A more subtle way to show it is through the images of Obama’s supporters and/or opponents. Some newspapers, like The Dallas Morning News, illustrated their front page with joyful Obama supporters, therefore putting a positive spin on the report; while others, like the Los Angeles Times chose to show Tea Party supporters in tears, with a more “bad news” approach.

The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post used images of both groups. While The WSJ focused on the opposite reactions, showing separate pictures of both Obama’s suppoerters’ celebrations and Tea Party’s tears; the Post focused on the animosity between them, with a photograph of an argument in progress.

Other newspapers used images of patients, shifting the focus from politics’ victory / loss to the possible effects of the bill in people’s lives. The Seattle Times showed a picture of a young child receiving a shot from his mother — an image that evokes the emotional and protective side of readers — with the possible reading “this bill will save this poor innocent child’s life”

The San Francisco Chronicle depicted a middle-aged man in a medical office. The man has latin-american facial features, placing emphasis in the large hispanic population in the area, relating it to the consequences of the bill.

In Alabama, a state where over 30% of the population is obese, The Decatur Daily showed a young female patient and a doctor in a doctor’s office, both clearly overweight. The image subtlety draws attention to the obesity epidemic that affects that country, and that has a massive impact on healthcare costs.

The New York Post, as usual, has no love for subtlety. ;)

"Constancy of design puts the emphasis on changes in data, not changes in data frames."

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:31:23 +0200

““Constancy of design puts the emphasis on changes in data, not changes in data frames.””

- Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information. p.67.

The red line he walks on makes the “rupture” in the...

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:20:08 +0200

The red line he walks on makes the “rupture” in the headline even more dramatic.

The President and Pinocchio

Wed, 16 May 2012 23:24:53 +0200

Dilma Roussef, Brazil’s President, appeared today on the O Globo website, one of Brazil,s biggest newspapers. The headline reads “Dilma installs Truth Commission, gets emotional and cries”, referring to the commission created to uncover information from the so-far secret files of Brazil’s military regime, that lasted from 1964 to 1985.

The picture that followed the headline shows Dilma pulling the tip of her nose, as if to stretch it. The reference to “growing nose” right under the headline about the Truth Commission may be read as contradictory.

And, a few hours after posting the image on its homepage, O Globo might have had noticed it too… Since they later changed it for a new image and a new headline for the article, in place of the Truth/Pinocchio one.

—thanks to Samara Tanaka for catching it and sending me this tip! ;)

left-right, up-down

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:35:36 +0200

The design of information graphics consists, basically, in arranging data in a visual way that conveys a message. Building a message involves various aspects, and one of them is orientation.

Our western cultural bias tells us that time progresses from left to right, and quantity grows upwards. Therefore, up means gain and right means progress in time.

from Volkswagen 2010 Annual Report

But what happens when information graphics do not follow this cultural convention? The chart below shows financial results from 2005 to 2009, but starts with the later year, moving right towards the earlier year. In a glimpse, the reader might have the negative feeling that sales are decreasing and be alarmed when, in fact, the sales have been increasing.

from Inditex 2009 Annual Report

Below, in one chart, we see two choices of time-progression orientation. Presenting information in this way can be very confusing for the reader, causing a distraction that can be useful, depending on whether you want to emphasize or understate results.

from Bertelsmann 2010 Annual Report

By trading the “up means gain” notion for “right means progress” when dealing with quantities, a horizontal bar chart can give the impression of progress toward a goal, with the longer bars seeming to be closer to the goal.

from Japan Post Bank 2010 Annual Report

Many times, however, there is no “goal” to be achieved (or the goal is not relevant to the chart), and displaying quantities in a horizontal bar chart can make the comparison confusing for the reader.

from Lloyds 2010 Annual Report

In the chart below, the attention is driven to the longest bar, but that result is from three years ago.

from Adidas 2009 Annual Report

Here, the difference in color drives attention to 09, even though 08 and 07 had better sales. But how would it look if this data had been portrayed as a usual xy chart?

from Boeing 2009 Annual Report

"Just because people might be more psychologically inclined to accept infographics as “more..."

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:28:49 +0100

“Just because people might be more psychologically inclined to accept infographics as “more objective” doesn’t mean that they actually are more objective. Graphic design is a language just like text, and it provides just as ample opportunity for obfuscation and distortion. The rub is that because graphics are so effective as communication tools, misleading graphics have the potential to be that much more dangerous as misinformation weapons.”

- Researchers Say Infographics Can Save Morons From Themselves. Really?

“Conveying the right...

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 22:04:48 +0200

“Conveying the right message”

from http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664719/infographic-of-the-day-why-should-you-care-about-typography

"The typographer’s one essential task is to interpret and communicate the text. Its tone, its..."

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 23:54:25 +0200

““The typographer’s one essential task is to interpret and communicate the text. Its tone, its tempo, its logical structure, its physical size, all determine the possibilities of its typographical form. The typographer is to the text as the theatrical director is to the script, or the musician to the score.””

- BRINGHURST, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Hartley & Marks, Publishers. Vancouver, 2004. p.20

nevver: Front Page of the Century

Sat, 07 May 2011 22:44:20 +0200

nevver:

Front Page of the Century

"Ideally, all books start with a question. The clearer the question, the more precise the answer, but..."

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:56:21 +0200

““Ideally, all books start with a question. The clearer the question, the more precise the answer, but this is rarely the case. You have to find out what the question is. Sometimes those involved need to sit together for days, weeks, months before a book takes shape - and then I am not even talking about its design, but the shape of the content. As designers we are as responsible for content as anyone else.””

- Armand Mevis - Every Book Starts with an Idea: Notes for Designers

from http://designedited.net/day/2011/03/28

A matter of style

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:31:38 +0100

Today, most newspapers around the world bring the same terrible news on their first pages: the tragedy in Japan. Never before has a natural disaster had so many quality pictures and footage, which provided for a stunning coverage.

Naturally, those amazing images were bound to end up on front pages around the globe, and the impact of such a tragic event calls for dramatic headlines to go along with shocking pictures.

below: Melbourne’s Herald Sun (Australia), Jaipur’s Rajasthan Patrika (India), New York’s New York Post (USA) and Berlin’s Bild (Germany).

Some newspapers, on the other hand, chose to focus on facts others than casualties. Bogota’s La Republica (Colombia) showed a strong picture of devastation, but with no fire or desolated faces of victims. Here, the emphasis of the image is on the destructive power of nature, instead of on human suffering. The headline took the economic approach: “Tsunami in Japan made stoke exchanges of the world tremble. Losses are estimated in US$ 10,000 millions.”

From Germany, comes a real piece of gold in minimalism. The always-elegant Frankfurter Allgemeine covered the tragedy using an image that shows the giant power of that earthquake, without showing any burning house, upiside-down ship or destroying wave. It shows a single picture on its front page: the register of the seismic waves from the earthquake on a seismometer.

Cultural biases

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:09:35 +0100

Here is an extract from How to lie with charts, a very clever book. I found this text interesting not only because it deals with the rhetorical use of orientation in charts, but also because it makes a valid point: that using rhetoric and cultural biases to the advantage of the communication is not unethical. In my opinion, knowing how to use them is not only unethical, but it is an essential skill for a communicator.

“Which of this signs might make a Western traveler feel more “positive” about a choice of routes?

Never mind that there is only one spot to place the sign in an airport terminal and the arrow must go the other way. Certainly, you can’t go pointing people in the wrong direction just to make them feel better. And no one would ignore a helpful left-pointing sign because of such a vague feeling. But, be aware that people carry those biases with them, no matter which way they decide to turn. You might not have any choice about which design to use in the airport situation, but you could give careful consideration to how you would use the same sign inside a store to direct shoppers to a merchandise display.

When your audience shares a set of biases, a chart will be more effective if its design plays to those assumptions deliberately. For example, you can probably assume that Westerners will interpret rightward motion as progress. Use that prejudice to your advantage! Don’t try to neutralize their biases, which probably isn’t possible anyway. Simply make your designs consistent with what they expect.

It might seem somehow unethical to reinforce these prejudices, but realize that you can’t escape them. Graphic conventions are as much a part of language as speech. Your choice of the language itself depends upon many conventions, including these notions of direction. Different sets of assumptions and visual biases will apply, for example, to native speakers of Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi (who read right to left) or Chinese (who sometimes read top to bottom).

In short, your charts aren’t international signs. You can’t make them cross-cultural, and you shouldn’t try. They will always have more impact if you are aware of cultural biases and play shamelessly to them!”

— JONES, Gerald Everett. How to lie with charts. La Puerta. Santa Monica, 2007. p.46-7

"When you get around to selecting a chart type in PowerPoint, if you want to mislead or distort,..."

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 20:58:00 +0100

““When you get around to selecting a chart type in PowerPoint, if you want to mislead or distort, choose dimensional pies or bars. It’s virtually impossible to make a 3D chart that doesn’t give a wrong impression.
In a 3D pie chart, the slice with the thickest edge will always seem larger than its true percentage.
In a 3D bar chart, it’s a challenge to find a rotation at which the short bars are still visible but the tall bars aren’t distorted by the perspective. Judging the heights of bars in a perspective view is a real challenge. So your audience can’t reliably estimate values (do visual take-offs) from your dimensional bars.””

- JONES, Gerald Everett. How to lie with charts. La Puerta. Santa Monica, 2007. p.XVII

“Don’t retreat. RELOAD!”

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:00:00 +0100

The tragic shooting in Arizona, U.S.A. was followed by a controversy involving Sarah Palin’s campaign “Let’s take back the 20!”

The use of cross-hairs aiming at the 20 Democrat’s districts (including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’), was connected to incitation of violence. How could it not be? How could gun references and the use of words such as “reload!” not be linked to violence? Wasn’t this the rhetorical path chosen for this piece?

Graphic design is never neutral.

Ornating information: information is political, in the way we...

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:17:13 +0100

Ornating information: information is political, in the way we use it.

Nice debate about information graphics.

joanafilizola:

INFOGRAPHIC PRINTS (via information aesthetics)

"Prohibitive cartography has its own graphic rhetoric. Because efficient enforcement depends on..."

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:39:00 +0100

““Prohibitive cartography has its own graphic rhetoric. Because efficient enforcement depends on well-defined territorial restrictions, the primary symbol on most prohibitive maps is the boundary line, underscored perhaps by labels and contrasting colors. By convention, small-scale political maps printed in colors rely heavily on dissimilar hues—when France is green and Germany is purple, there’s less need for the prominent dot-and-dashed “international boundary” symbol common on graytone maps. The mapmaker can emphasize national sovereignty with thick, solid black lines—the most prominent symbol on many State Department maps—or underscore disputed or otherwise tentative boundaries with equally thick dashed lines. By contrast, the thinner, less prominent dot-and-dashed line is a convenient, readily understood code useful with less strident atlas maps, on which political boundaries have a weaker claim to continuity than roads, railways, and rivers. By chance, line symbols with periodic gaps afford a more accurate representation of boundaries like the U.S.-Mexico border, which is far more permeable than an unbroken line might suggest.””

- MONMONIER, Mark. “No Dig, No Fly, No Go.How maps restrict and control”. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 2010. p.3

A line chart, but not really?

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:08:30 +0100

Take a look at these images from Jornal Nacional, the main TV news program in Brazil. Two nights ago, they announced the US$/BRL rate had dropped. They used a line chart. The angle of the line is big. Major drop? No. It was a 0,05% drop (from 1,723 to 1,722).

Then last night, it was up. A much bigger difference, at +0,34%. The line chart? It is there. The angle of the line? The same.

Conclusion? It is not a line chart. It indicates just a binary information: if the rate is up or down. Isn’t the up/down arrow already doing exactly that? So why use a line-graphic-like image, that implies the idea of “angle=quantity of change”?

Earlier in the week:

"The advent of color film-making (…) rendered black and white meaningful. Black and white was..."

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:13:48 +0100

““The advent of color film-making (…) rendered black and white meaningful. Black and white was consciously not color, thus intentionally serious, old-fashioned, or low budget.””

- HOVLAND, Pamela & ROCK, Michael. The Rise of Color in the Media. in The News Aesthetic. The Cooper Union School of Art. New York, 1995. p. 11