Integrative Arts 10
Iconography: Graphic Design
and Meaning
"Our attempts to define comics are an
ongoing process which won't end anytime soon. A new generation
will no doubt reject whatever this one finally decides to accept
and try once more to re-invent comics. And so they should. Here's
to the great debate."
-Scott McCloud
Basic Concepts of Graphic
Design
Iconography
The artist Magrite called this painting the Treachery
of Images. The inscription says, "This is not a
pipe" and indeed it is not. In actuality it is an electronic
copy of a scan of a printing taken from a photograph of a
painting of what may or may not have been an actual pipe. In any
case, it is not a pipe. Rather it is a sign, a symbol that
signifies our experience and draws on what we know of a real
pipe. Graphic designers are a funny bunch. Plato in his allegory
of the cave called artists knowledge second rate because they can
only ever know the imitation of objects. It's funny that even
thousands of years ago folks were perplexed by the treachery of
images. It's even funnier that Plato chose to write a piece of
fiction to decry art... you decide.
In the same vein, here is another treacherous
image.
This is not music. This is a graphic system of denoting musical
compositions. As Robert Crumb wrote, "It's just lines on
paper folks!"
If this is true, why do we get so passionate about these cheap
imitations of reality? When we go to the cinema we are actually
looking at an inanimate jumble of light, shadow and noise right?
The cognitive process the mind undertakes as we make sense
out of the chaotic shapes and sounds we are exposed to is called closure.
Closure works on many different levels.
For example:
Just as the pixels of this monitor make up
this web page, the dots of this painting create solid colors when
viewed from a distance. Roy Liechtenstein made a career out of
appropriating images from cheap romance and adventure comic books
and recreating the images dot by painted dot. This technique,
aside from colliding high and low art, plays with the idea of
paint recreating a mechanical process. What does this have to do
with closure? As you get farther away from the pixels and from
the halftone dots that make up the above detail, the dots become
a solid color and are organized as components of a larger whole.
Another example of closure:
What happens between
these frames?
Closure allows us to construct meaning from wildly diverse
images. This process was pioneered by the Russian film makers at
the beginning of the century. They realized they could take
sequences of film and place them in an order beside chronological
and the audience knew what was going on. In fact, these directors
soon realized the audiences were having stronger emotional
reactions to what they couldn't see than what they could see. As
in the images above, our sick little minds fill in all of the
gory details that are missing. The Russians called it Montage,
(hey, that's a French word!?) this is the process of mounting
images next to one another and letting the meaning arise from the
juxtaposition. The cinematic equivalent of the two panels above
would be a jump cut.
A final facet of this thing called closure:
Have you
seen the image of the face on the surface of Mars? There is a
rock formation photographed in the 70s that when viewed from a
certain angle looks like a startled Roman Centurion. ...Well,
what do you see then?
Closure places order on objects and phenomena. It's a human
drive to understand mysterious events by constructing meanings,
be they right or wrong, right? When the Mars global surveyor took
some images of the same sight early in 1998 those same rocks
looked surprisingly like... well... rocks.
Representationalism / Iconic
Take a look at the continuum of faces above. From the left to
the right you will notice these faces go from a higher degree of
detail to a lower degree. The more realistic a drawing is, the
higher the degree of verisimilitude.
Verisimilitude (a great word to throw around at parties) is a
50 cent way to say realistic. Thinks about what types of comic
strips use more iconic characters and which strips use characters
with a higher degree of graphic verisimilitude. And then figure
out why.
- Composition
- Negative and Positive Space
- Open / Closed form
Graphic Techniques
- Linear Perspective
- Foreshortening
Aerial Perspective Phenomenon - color value and density
fade with distance
-
-
-
Force and Counter-force
Line Quality
Texture
Color
Value
- lightest colors have a higher value and vice versa.
Hue / Density / Chroma -
Hue/chroma is the basic primary or secondary color. Density is
its purity. Look at the example below and follow the color mixing
from left to right. Primary red mixed with white results in pink,
its hue still belongs to red, the value has risen becasue of the
addition of white and its density is lower because the red is
more diffused.
High Contrast Cast Shadows - In this frame from
Terry and the Pirates notice how crisp and defined all the
shadows are. It is as if the sun was unobscured by any atmosphere
or clouds and the room reflected no light. The artist using this
technique may choose to use it to show the severity of a
situation or because it's a simple and direct way to keep your
reader interested in the action of the story instead of focusing
on the formalistic aspects of the strip.
Chiaroscuro
Denotative - description of obvious visual elements
Connotative - constructing meaning of placement and other aspects
of visual elements
Really interested in this kind of stuff?
Run, don't walk, to the local gigantic bookseller and pick up
Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. (ISBN
0-06-097625-x) All of these concepts and many more are given a
full treatment and it's fun too.