Books Still? Week 2

A cut-up I started in 2011 and have not yet finished.

Three workshop exercises to get us thinking about reading, and designing for readers:

1. Dictionary page cut-up:
Take the two dictionary entries provided, cut all the words out and rearrange them to create a new entry. Use all of the words and punctuation marks. Layout and paste down the new entry onto an A5 page, considering the page composition (positive and negative space, how the arrangement of elements affects the pace of reading).

Further resources:

• Tristram Tzara's Dada Manifesto, particularly instructions on making a Dadaist Poem.
• Jeff Noon's manifesto 'How to make a modern novel', published in The Guardian, arguing that writers should borrow techniques of film makers and musicians: jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion, remix, scratch, sample.
• Graham Rawle Woman’s World, (shown in class) particularly the 'making of' with annotated pictures of process, including experiments he didn't use in the final work.

2. Erasure:
Read the page of text provided. Read it again. Choose three aspects of the text to focus on, e.g. adjectives, nouns, metaphors, repeated words, themes. Using three graphic treatments – strike-through, black out, cut out — assign one graphic treatment to each aspect and apply it to the text.

Further resources:

• The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
• Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer

3. Cut-up concertina book:
Choose one of the texts provided. Using only the pages supplied, cut-up the text and redesign it as a concertina, flower-fold or x-fold book. You need to complete this within an hour – draw up a grid, be systematic in your approach.

Books Still? Week 1: brief and tap-essays

Since 1975, the International Society of Typographic Designers has run an annual Student Assessment competition, with a series of set briefs. This year, I'm teaching a 3rd year Visual Communication project based on the 2013 'Books Still?' brief, which proposes:

Working with content that you have selected you are asked to develop an editorial design project that considers how we read in the 21st century. Choose a format that is appropriate for your subject matter and your target market. It could be a high quality printed publication, a screen-based interpretation or a combination of these. Current developments in publishing should be considered such as printed books, apps, ‘Print on Demand’ (PoD) hypertext links in digital formats … .

Possible content could include genre publishing such as crime, literary fiction, Illustrated books, thriller, science fiction, film, history, classic novels, short stories, or your project could move beyond book design into the broader arena of editorial design to include journals, newsletters, newspaper supplements.

I have restricted my students to working with non-fiction, and set three text options to choose from: a series of recipes from Mark Crick's Kafka's Soup: A complete history of World Literature in 14 Recipes; an excerpt from 'The Art of Fiction No. 36', an interview with William S. Burroughs by Conrad Knickerbocker for The Paris Review; an excerpt from Gabrielle Carey's forthcoming book Young Man of Dangerous Tendencies. 

To start the conversation on how we read in the 21st century, we looked at Robin Sloan's 'tap essay' Fish. A tap essay, or tappable story, is a digital storytelling medium for iPad/iPhone. Readers tap the screen to move forward, but there is no moving backwards – if you accidentally skip forward, you have to progress through the whole essay and start over to find your place.  

Image source: www.robinsloan.com/fish/

Fish is a "short but heartfelt manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet" which is presented as a 'tap-essay'. After reading the essay, consider the ways the author has manipulated our reading experience, through typographic pacing and the interface design of the essay:

• At times, only one word is revealed per tap, other times whole sentences. 
• Hierarchy (point size, colour) is used for emphasis. 
• There are ‘pause’ screens in there – blank screens that indicate we should reflect, hold onto the previous thought a while longer before continuing. 
• By only allowing us to click forward, never back, Sloan forces us to slow down – if we tap too quickly, we become lost. I’ve shown this to a few people and watched them launch into rapid tapping, to skim and see what ‘happens’, entirely missing the point, but also performing the reason that we need reading experiences designed like this. Slow down. Read something properly. If our default reaction is to skim in order to ‘get to the point’ as quickly as possible, we may end up never getting the point.

Robin Sloan’s first novel, Mr. Penumba’s 24-Hour Bookstore, is awaiting my focused attention, in the 'Read Next' book pile on my desk. Other novels that use unconventional typography to effect reading pace are: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves; Douglas Copeland’s J-Pod.

Interactive book covers

In November last year I posted about the possibility of designing digital book covers using animated gifs, as a way to address issues associated with thumbnail-size covers on Amazon and other online book sellers, where consumers increasingly browse books. This morning, a post on Design Week describes an 'interactive book cover' for A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Published by Canongate, art director Rafi Romaya collaborated with creative agency Big Active. The book is being released simultaneously as an ebook, audio download, hardback and paperback. The 'interactive' aspect of the physical book cover involves Blippar technology (augmented reality) – using the camera on a smart phone/tablet, you can link to audio/visual material, via the Blippar app. Canongate and Blippar are touting this as the first time the technology has been used for a "fully interactive book cover". View a demonstration of how to 'blip' the interactive jacket here and find out more about Blippar here. My first and admittedly pedantic reaction is that the book cover is not "fully interactive". The smart device is the interactive bit, the book is just a book. There is a sticker you can peel off, which is technically an interactive element. The interactivity you reach, via smart device or the website, is a very short animation (around 15 seconds) – it's slickly produced and rich in imagery, but resembles a Adobe tutorial exercise in layering – and  links to additional material (paratexts) – author interviews, and social media conversations (this appears to be a Facebook page where members will be part of a virtual book group). It feels to me like smoother version of a QR code-reader (Wikipedia definition, if this is foreign to you). Although I find this fascinating as a case study for future publishing models, it also leaves me uneasy.

The Design Week article quotes Cate Cannon, head of marketing at Canongate, describing this publishing model as an exercise in branding:

‘The animation and design translates across our digital outdoor advertising, our website and all our editions, creating a brand identity for this novel that is enriching, engaging and progressive.’

Screen grab from Canongate website.

 Above is the suite of formats the book comes in. I got to this page by clicking the FREE EBOOK button. You can get a free ebook, as long as you buy the physical book. The copy reads:

Do you ever think that you'd love to just buy a book once, but be able to read it in paperback in the bath, or put the hardback lovingly onto your bookcase, or pick up where you left off on your Kindle on the tube? This bundle is a tiny step in that direction. The hardback is a thing of much beauty – a spineless wonder that lies flat whilst you read it, with a peelable red sticker on the front and stunningly designed end papers that reveal more of the hidden front artwork. The eBook means you don't have to lug it away from home. Our offer gives a free eBook plus £5 off the original hardback RRP, at a special bundle price of £15.00.

Yes, I do love to buy a book once, but I also just want one book. This many options seems unnecessary for a novel. If this was a reference book, or a publication with audio-visual content, or a stack of extra images/material accessible in the digital format, I can see the value of multiple versions. Romaya (art director) is quoted by Design Week: ‘The multiple format release model recalled the experimentation which has taken place in the music industry in recent years, while publishing is working through equivalent changes.’ For me, the difference between having music accessible in different places is different to having a book accessible in different places. I can do other things while I listen to music. When I read, especially a novel or other long form work, I have to focus. If I was engrossed reading the physical book but had to rush to work, would I continue reading on a tablet on my commute to work, then return to the physical book when I came home? Would jumping between the print edition and a tablet edition affect my experience of the story? It obviously affects my physical experience of reading – tangible sensations of handling the page/screen, the way light is reflected into my eye, the weight of the object, the bulk of the object. But would it affect the way I engage with the work, in the same way I engage with a film differently when I see it in the cinema or at home on a dvd?

But the unease I feel is more than my resistance to reading long texts on screen, or mild anxiety that there is already so much STUFF in my life, do I want to receive five versions of everything I buy? It also has to do with the 'brandification' of books. I'm aware that this seems hypocritical, coming from a book designer. Obviously, I think covers are an important marketing tool. When a cover is effective, it attracts readers by communicating something of the context of a book – what kind of book it is, where it sits in the market, but an effective cover also reflects the world of the book – it evokes a sense of the narrative and writing style. To me, a book cover is about more than creating a brand for a book, it's about being respectful of the content. You can't judge a book by it's cover, but you also can't judge a cover unless you know something of the book. So without having read A Tale For the Time Being, I can't pass judgement on the cover or animation in relation to how well they evoke the world of the book, or position it in the market. There is no element of the design I object to. But there is something, that I am struggling terribly to articulate, that leaves me uneasy about this. And it comes back to the problem at the center of my doctoral thesis: this feels like a gimmick. If I had bought this book, followed the process of 'blipping' the cover (which for me, would include downloading the app) and ended up at the website with a 15 second animation, an interview with the author, and a link to a Facebook page, I would be disappointed, and possibly angry. There is an awful lot of fanfare, for very little payoff.

Faraway Cutouts

Inspired by Sandra Kaji-O'Grady's 2007 exhibition 'Cuts and Scores' in the DABLAB Gallery at UTS, I ordered a few pianola rolls from eBay. Sandra's exhibition blurb describes her work as: "new compositions that explore the relationships between musical systems, spatial order and chromatics through strips of colour meticulously interwoven with old pianola rolls." My interest was less in musical systems or colour and more in threading strip of written text through the roll to create cut up poems. At the time, I'd been cutting out chapter headings from a book Triumphs in Bird-Life while collaging into the book (it's an unillustrated volume, I was adding some birds), and thought they'd make a great piece on their own:

Chapter headings cut out of Triumphs in Bird-Life

Turns out these text fragments are too small to fit into the pianola roll, but I liked the idea and started playing with text from other books. Then I did nothing for a couple of years, until a friend commissioned an artwork as a Christmas present for her partner, whose favourite childhood book was The Magic Faraway Tree. I found a copy in a second hand book store and got cutting. I didn't mean for it to become smutty – but I'm not convinced Enid Blyton was as surprised as I:

To the left is the full artwork, framed.

 

On Reading

For some time, I've been confused about what I love and what I fear. I thought I loved books, but what I actually love is the experience of reading. I thought I feared the 'end of print', but what I actually fear is the end of reading in a way that is private, insightful, and mine to own.

My confusion has been in mistaking the thing – the printed book – for the experience it makes possible. It's easy to become distracted by the tactile pleasure of paper stock, the subtle smell of ink on a page, the familiarity that develops with my copy of a favourite book and other fetishes common to bibliophiles. These material concerns are important because they add a sensory dimension to the reading experience, but they're not the heart of the matter. As a publication designer, material and graphic elements are my concern – presenting an author's work in a readable form. In my professional work I focus on designing the tangible thing, but I am always mindful of the purpose thing in the first place: to communicate to readers – preferably, in an evocative and meaningful way.

What I love about books as objects is the anticipation of what's within. I was drawn to book design because I wanted to make beautiful things, but also because I wanted to work with great content. What's most important to me – as a designer and educator – is design that responds to the needs of the reader. I own an impressive collection of beautiful books, but I don't love any of them unless the content takes me beyond the surface of the book and to the world within. This is not to say that book design is meaningless or superfluous. But the surface of a book is such a transient part of it. This goes some way to explaining why I shifted from commercial design to academia – a desire to be involved in developing the content as well as designing its material incarnation.

Coral alphabet

I took some time off in early December for an unplugged week in Fiji (no phone, no internet). With little else to do but wander on the beach, I accidentally found an alphabet of coral pieces. Except a Z.

Digital Serials – a new space for illustration?

Amazon Publishing has introduced Kindle Serials, a format for publishing original content (previously unpublished work) in episodes. From the site:

"Kindle Serials are stories published in episodes. When you buy a Kindle Serial, you will receive all existing episodes on your Kindle immediately, followed by future episodes as they are published at no additional cost. Enjoy reading as the author creates the story, and discuss episodes with other readers in the Kindle forums."

They aim to have 15 titles published by the end of the year. Arthur Kelbanoff reports that Amazon Publishing is also releasing previously unpublished work by deceased authors, starting with Kurt Vonnegut. A collection of six short stories and an unpublished essay titled 'Sucker's Portfolio' is priced at $2.99. As soon as I finishing typing this, I'm buying it.

In the 17 and 1800s novels were published as serialised 'pamphlets', usually in volumes of three. Illustrations were commissioned by the publisher, to display in bookseller's windows, advertising the new installments – see the illustrations of William Hogarth, George Cruikshank and William Thackeray. These illustrations often made it into complete edition of these novels – as frontispiece illustrations or illustrated plates scattered in the text. Perhaps this is an opportunity for illustrators to work with literary fiction, reinventing the tradition.

Animated gifs for digital book covers

I chaired a Sydney Writers’ Festival panel this year on book cover design. Stephen Banham (founder of Melbourne design studio Letterbox) described designing the cover for his latest book Characters so it was graphically bold, and easily recognisable where most people will buy it – online. Below is a screenshot of the book at icon size from Banham's site, and a larger image taken from imprint magazine's review of the book:

The Waste Land for iPad

As screen technologies advance, the possibilities for publication design expand. In particular, publications for digital tablets are changing the way information is organised and presented as a ‘text.’ An innovative example is an edition of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ for the iPad, produced by Touch Press in 2011. The edition takes a primary text – the full poem – and presents it simply: classically typeset in a continuous scroll, with a basic menu to navigate the poem’s five parts. However, the primary text is packaged with an archive of paratexts: snippets of video commentary show writers, actors, theatre directors, musicians, academics and publishers discussing Eliot’s life and work; a highly produced performance of the poem, filmed specially for this edition; readings by famous actors, poets and Eliot himself in 1933 and 1944; a facsimile of Eliot’s original manuscript, hand-edited by Ezra Pound; and a gallery of photographs and other images with annotations relating them to the poem. The reader can dip into this readily accessible archive of paratexts to elaborate the poem, in a variety of ways. Rather than trying to replicate the feeling of a print book, this publication offers moving image, audio and images that enhances and extends the original poem.

Future of newspapers, reading online,

As I get my head back into a focused research space, articles and other things I'm reading keep triggering me to write. I tapped out the following on my iPad in response to an article in the weekend paper – as I start writing, the response to the article leads to clarity in what I'm thinking about more broadly. I started blogging again to encourage this free writing process.

Elaborate books: research presentation

In October, all full time staff in the Faculty of Design and Architecture presented current research projects in a one day symposium. My presentation was titled 'Elaborate Books: alternate approaches to disseminating design research', the abstract follows:

Research Question / Area

How could emerging formats (ePublications, apps, hybrid books, enhanced archives, print/digital hybrid editions) be used to disseminate design research?

The Great eBook Debate

http://greylands.theslipstream.com.au/

The site was set up to relaunch Isobelle Carmody’s popular but out of print novel Greylands as an eBook. The site hosts events and a wealth of content, but is only live for a month. One section is ‘The Great eBook Debate’, where each day in the month a guest librarian, writer or scholar is invited to post about an issue or topic related to ebooks and libraries. Conversations through the comments streams are encouraged, and lively. There are some great summaries of the issues libraries face from the candid perspective of librarians and scholars, using layperson language.

NLA’s Academic Librarian Rebecca Kemble (‘Ebooks and Libraries’ posted 19 July 2012) describes the ‘popular certainty’ that the internet would lead to the death of the physical library as a fallacy similar to the idea of the ‘paperless office’.  She also explains the requirements of Legal Deposit – basically publishers and self publishing authors have to deposit a copy of any print work published in Australia with the NLA, and they are currently campaigning to have the terms of Legal Deposit altered to include electronic materials.

Of the launch site itself, this is an interesting paratext that is designed to draw readers in to the primary text (the eBook itself) through a range of discussion and extra material. Like a literary Happy Meal. Carmody says:

“It was always one of my personal favourites among the books I have written, for reasons you will discover here, as the days pass, but it was out of print. Now books have always gone out of print and authors have always accepted they must, unless they rose into the heavens as classics. But in this brave new world of eBooks, there is no longer any need for any book to g out of print. Cyberspace is the library of the infinite.”

Thesis available to download

My thesis is now available to download as a (rather large) PDF here.

Feedback would be great, but no grammar or spelling mistakes please (unless you're prepared to publish the thing). Best of luck to those still in the process – life is unimaginably better on the other side.

What does a design thesis look like?

A few people have asked me whether my thesis has 'pictures' in it. Above are two double page spreads to show how I've used images. The top spread shows how they are used as 'quotations' – these are scanned in pages from Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Other images are from my process work – this bottom spread is from the appendix in which I describe the 'Sundays' exhibition I produced (to think through semiotic language).

The end is here

I have three copies of the final thesis sitting next to me, and am just waiting for the person whose desk I have to drop them on to arrive. Thank you to all who gave me feedback and encouragement through this blog – it has been an invaluable tool for my research, and I can't recommend using a blog in this way highly enough.

As sanity slowly seeps back in and I realise what I have just accomplished, I leave those of you in the process of completing a thesis with some comments you should be prepared for in the final stages of writing, to avoid a sociopathic outburst:

Haven't you finished yet?
Calm down, they're probably trying to make a joke.

70,000 words ... how do you keep that interesting?
There is no response to this, and we both know why.

The look that accompanies how's it all going?
On part fear you will start to cry, three parts fear you will actually try to explain it. I'd like to point out I wasn't reduced to tears, but I'm pretty sure I bored a couple of people to death a couple of Saturdays ago. Sorry about that.

You look REALLY tired.
I've never understood why it's not ok to tell people when they look fat, but it's fine to tell them that they look awful. Nevertheless, it's probably true, so just try to smile so they don't think you look awful and you're miserable.

Right, the person has arrived, I'm off to submit, then sleep and drink, whichever happens first.

Thesis brain

I bumped into my friend Tobias who described feeling, in the final stage of his thesis last year, like one part of his brain got bigger to finish the thing, and so the other part had to get smaller. Yes. What he said.

analysis – critique

It's been two months since my last post, in which time I've been working like a dog to get the thesis finished. I'm aiming to submit on the 31st of August, and using the logic a friend once used to travel to India – if I tell everyone I'm doing it, I'll have to follow through because repeatedly explaining why I'm not there is more hassle than just doing it (thanks, Drew).

One fairly major distinction I still need to clarify, and I'd love some feedback, is the distinction between analysis and critique. At the moment, I'm rolling with the idea that analysis is the process of breaking something apart to see how it works (taking a graphic device, like a photograph, and examining it as an image, but also a device in the context of the novel), whereas critique is making an evaluation of the effectiveness of the device. My issue is this – is critique an intrinsic part of analysis? Maybe, rather than critique, I really mean the articulation of critique ... but is that just a more complicated way of saying critique?

Again, any help here would be greatly appreciated.

On Reading Graphic Novels (differently)

I stumbled across this blog post by Rick Kleffel this morning, I don't have time to comment on it properly, but it's a great essay on the differences between reading conventional and graphic novels, and the author's hesitation to move from the familiarity of text boxes to the relative chaos of comic format:

But damn it, it's the words and pictures that threw me at first, even when I wanted, I really wanted to read them. You see, as I pick up a graphic novel to read, I'd just speed through the words and glance at the pictures, applying the same reading sensibility to the graphic novel that I did to the typeset novel. That style of reading renders the graphic novel into an annoyingly vapid and underwhelming reading experience. The pictures then lack the fullness of illustrations and the words lack the richness of a novel. The experience won’t gel correctly if you read graphic novels like novels.

http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/12-31-04.htm

Rief Larsen's lost images

Rief Larsen's new release, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, includes drawings, diagrams and graphs, attributed to the narrator and protagonist (T.S. Spivet, a twelve-year-old genius cartographer) and produced by Larsen. I haven't got my hands on a copy yet, so I can't comment on the success of the integration, but of great interest is that on Amazon.com, Larsen discusses his motivation for integrating the graphic elements:

"I initially wrote a draft of The Selected Works without any accompanying illustrations. After reaching the end, I still had that tingly feeling that usually means something is missing, and so I thought about it for awhile and realized that in order to really understand T.S., we actually need to see his drawings laid out on the page. T.S. was most comfortable in the exploding diagram or the annotation or the bitchin’ bar graph; this marginal material was where he would often let down his guard and reveal something he wouldn’t otherwise in the main text."

Larsen also provides an annotated list of "lost images" – graphic elements he produced but decided against including, with reasons why. A film director is allowed, in 'special features' additions to DVDs, to include 'lost scenes' for the dedicated to access, why not the novelist?

NOTE: I got a copy and I had to take it to my parents house so I didn't start reading it (NO reading, only writing) because it's a beautiful thing. I can't wait.

Interview

Here's the link to an interview I did a while ago over email - I was surprisingly articulate (and characteristically belligerent). Again, I still don't quite understand how I can write an articulate email but not type an articulate paragraph in a word document:
http://savvy.com/savvy_style/life_in_pictures

Tips from Dunleavy

"Authoring and thinking go together. You will very rarely work out what you think first, and then just write it down. Normally the act of committing words to screen (or pen and paper) will make an important contribution to your working out what it is that you do think. In other words, the act of writing may often be constitutive of your thinking. Left to ourselves we can all of us keep conflicting ideas in play almost indefinitely" (26)

State of Play

So the writing was going well, and I was giving myself smug pats on the back for having produced about 45,000 words (which I knew needed heavy editing, but stuff was being committed to paper). Then I stopped, took a step back and realised my argument didn't work. In fact, I was making about four arguments, and slipping in and out of all of them in different chapters. My chapter outline looked so neat and achievable on a digital A3 diagram, but when I started writing, it went horribly pear shaped. I knew it, but it took me months to accept it. As a smart man used to comment when I was labouring over piece of awful artwork: "there's no use flogging a dead horse."

So. I had a little cry, raged about a bit, drank a lot of wine and now I'm ready to start over. As Kate suggests, a metaphor is a helpful way to understand the bigger picture. And so it goes like this:

I'm standing in a fully stocked kitchen, but I don't know what I want to cook. Cooking by putting everything I like into one pot will not produce an edible meal. The ingredients have to be selected because they 'work' together. Once I decide what I want to make, there will be a lot of unused ingredients, but that's ok, I can use them to make something else later. (Or they might go off and I'll just have to throw them out). Everything I need is here, I just have to choose a recipe.

As I was staring at my keyboard and thinking it's ok, it's ok, it's ok, the computer spoke to me ... surely I can't be the first person restarting a writing project who has noticed these keys, telling me what to do:
Either that, or this is the point the psychologists will flag as when I "crossed the line".

the value of practitioner-researchers

Reviewing Jobling and Crowley's Graphic Design: Reproduction & Representation Since 1800 (1996), Victor Margolin ends with this criticism:

They are too ready to sacrifice design at the altar of an all-consuming capitalism, unlike Twyman, Meggs, and Hollis, who, as practitioners, convey in their writings a passion for graphic communication that is missing here. There is no reason why we can’t have critical analysis and a passionate engagement with the material. But that is another project.

This sounds like an argument for practice led research to me.

Media, mode, materiality

I think I had a go at this before, but I'm going to do it again. One of the issues working across disciplines is defining terms. As mentioned previously, my main problem is the word 'image': to a novelist, an image is created in the mind of the reader; to a designer, an image is an original artwork or reproduction of that artwork (where artwork could mean photograph, drawing, digital image, etc). Media, medium and materiality pose similar problems, but this time from art and communication theory. The media could mean the press, it could refer to paint or clay, it could distinguish between print or digital. Materiality could be form or it could be content. Ugly, I know.

Rather than trying to clarify this mess, I'm just going to state how I'm using the terms through an example.

1. An original pencil drawing on paper. The media is drawing (it is made by the act of drawing), the mode is visual (as opposed to verbal), the materiality is lead on paper (the surface it exists on, how we access it). It is a drawing.

2. When that original drawing is scanned, the media is now digital (it is made by pixel data), the mode is still visual, but the materiality is screen (pixels appear on the computer screen). It is a digitized drawing.

3. When that digital version of the original drawing is reproduced in a book, the media is now print (it is made by mechanical printing), mode is still visual, materiality is ink on paper. It is the reproduction of a drawing.

Anyway, the main point is that I can change the media or materiality and I still call it a drawing (though qualified with original, digital or reproduction). However, if I were to change the mode, and 'interpret' a drawing verbally or perhaps musically (ekphrasis), the it ceases to be a drawing and then becomes and interpretation of a drawing.

Does that make ANY sense? Maybe I have media and materiality mixed up? And is that actually faulty reasoning because the difference between a 'reproduction' of a drawing and an 'interpretation' of a drawing are not actually that different? I have a feeling like this is either quite important or absolutely irrelevant (which is a micro/macro feeling to the entire PhD).

PhD epiphanies

Post-it of the week

Timo's blog

As if to rub in how self-absorbed I've become in my own research, I only realised TODAY that Timo, my fellow PhD candidate and partner in Postgrad Room high-jinx (which mostly involves laughing at ourselves, each other and stuff on You Tube) has a blog he's been running for 18 months or so. Well worth a nose around.

Post-it of the week

Spelling it out isn't coming so easily (I've never been a good speller, ask my Mum) but the saying no thing is surprisingly liberating.

Pistols! Treason! Murder! (gimmicks)

I recently met Jon Walker – a research fellow in history at Sydney University – whose unconventional biography Pistols! Treason! Murder! The rise and fall of a master spy was published in Feb 2007 by Melbourne University Press. The book is described as a biography of both person and place: Gerolamo Vano, one of the original spy masters, and 17th Century Venice as a city of espionage. Of particular interest to me is the inclusion of "playful comic strips, transcripts of imaginary conversations and a bar-crawl around contemporary Venice." (from the book's blurb, as listed on Jon's website) Several papers given about the book have referred it as "a multimedia assassination". [what's the difference between multimedia and multi-modal?] Jon worked in collaboration with illustrator Dan Hallet to produce these graphic elements. The original manuscript included just four illustrations (which didn't end up in the final version – Jon decided they were not up to scratch) and his editor at MUP requested more of these. Jon scripted what was to go in the illustrations, and Dan produced them, sometimes closely following the brief and sometimes pushing it. In conversation, Jon discussed that the text editing process was rigorous, but although the illustrations and graphic elements were endorsed by the editor, they weren't actually edited - allowing the author (and illustrator) greater freedom of expression with these elements. Were the visual devices not edited because the editor didn't know how, or because they were seen as less meaningful?

By email, Jon also explained that although MUP were supportive of the non-written elements and never questioned the value of using four different typefaces, other editors/agents were not so supportive: "By contrast, conversations I've had with other editors and agents about the possibility of overseas editions are almost always prefaced with remarks like, 'I wish you'd done it as a 'proper' history book. We'd have to get rid of all the pictures and the weird typefaces ...'."

Jon's book was nominated for the NSW Premier's History Award in 2007 and was described as 'our first true work of punk-history'. However, it has also at times received the same criticism as the fictional works I'm looking at - that the typo/graphic elements are 'gimmicks':

"The book is not helped by a motley collection of gimmicks such as comic strips and imagined conversations between invented 'historians. It's all rather confusing, but perhaps that's what Walker intended?" Paul Collins in the Herald.

Referring to the non-written material, most online sources seem to do as I have done above - regurgitate the blurb text that the book includes "playful comics strips ...", word for word. My defense is that I haven't actually read the book yet, as soon as I do I'll update the post. Perhaps it could be overlooked as time saving (lazy writing), or perhaps – again – reviewers are unsure how to tackle a description of the function of these elements?

In an interview with UK magazine Computer Arts Dan Hallett [click on Dan's name to see portfolio of illustrations from Pistols!] describes the intended function of his illustrations: "I want my work to tell a story or stimulate a thought. It is all about communication, even if the message is not always specific."

Jon questions the conventions of historical research and writing through his work. The abstract to a 2003 article published in Rethinking History:

This article attempts to do a number of things: Firstly, it describes the assassination of a priest called Giulio Cazzari in Venice in 1622, using the reports of a spy named Gerolamo Vano as a principal source. It confronts the distance between the experience of death and the representation of death, and explores possible connections between our understanding of death and our understanding of time. It uses formal experimentation and deliberate anachronism (inspired by Futurist literature and photography and the graphic novels of Alan Moore) to dramatise these themes. It does not, however, contain any detailed discussion of seventeenth-century espionage or diplomatic culture, or much in the way of context. This omission is itself part of an implicit argument about the nature of historical knowledge: i.e. that a meditation upon time and death is a natural and appropriate subject for a historian and that archival documents can be used as raw material for such a discussion. Historians should have the courage to ask questions that have no answers (in other words, metaphysical questions). Rethinking History, Volume 7, Number 2, June 2003 , pp. 139-167(29)

Jon's next book project is an illustrated novel. Watch this space.

Exploiting Borrowed Emotion

...was an idea I picked up from one reviewer's description of the still from Casablanca at the end of The Raw Shark Texts. I've come across it again in a review of Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Too much in the middle of what I'm doing to store it anywhere else but here:

In a blurb to this book, Salman Rushdie writes: ‘Perhaps the highest praise I can give is to say it completely earns the right to take on the World Trade Centre atrocity. The powerful emotions generated feel deserved, not borrowed.’ Most of the time, I felt the opposite. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close offers, along with many local pleasures – Safran Foer is a writer of considerable brilliance – a narcissistic realism, in love with it own gimmickry. By the time you get to the end, and flip backwards through the pictures of the falling figure to restore the victim to the top of the skyscraper, as Oskar wishes, you may feel a good deal of the emotion has been borrowed and not quite deserved. Adams, T. 2005, ‘A nine-year-old and 9/11’, Guardian (Books), May 29

*note use of 'gimmickry' again

Idea of 'borrowing' emotion relates back to the postmodern idea of all texts being fragments of other texts - existing within the continuum of all literature (including film and other media) - we can't help making comparisons and drawing on our past experience to interpret the work at hand. Why not exploit that?

A review of Mysterious Flame (Umberto Eco) states:

In the Eco-ian universe, books aren’t merely stand-alone islands to be traversed in linear fashion; they are nodes in an exponentially expanding extranet. To read one book, you sometimes have to pass through several others, accumulating countless references and subtexts along the way. Ng, D. 2005, ‘Eco and the funnymen’, Village Voice, vol. 50, no. 27, pp. 32

Post-it of the week

Vonnegut's doodles...

An essay by Peter Reed on Kurt Vonnegut's website (http://www.vonnegut.com/artist.asp ... reprinted from Volume 10, Issue No. 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 1999 Florida Altantic University) says of the felt-tip pen drawings that appear scattered throughout several of Vonnegut's novels:

“the drawings earn their place in the novel, and must be seen as integral to it. Some make graphic the ludicrous disparities that often exist between words as signifiers and what it is they signify. Others simply function as embellishments or even punch lines of jokes. In their almost child-like simplicity of line they have a certain ironic propriety in a novel where the central event is an arts fair. Above all, they are part of-and draw attention to-the seemingly naive, even adolescent, perspective by which Vonnegut deconstructs and demystifies American culture and society in this novel."

The word integral is important - again, these drawings aren't visual 'gimmicks', but part of the text. They serve a function within the text that goes beyond reflecting/reinterpreting the writing. Vonnegut called them "felt tip calligraphs".

Thanks, Wikipedia

About a year ago I made a bet with another researcher that I could reference Wikipedia a couple of times (legitimately) in my thesis. It was a joke at the time, based on the look of horror when I told someone that I understood Phenomenology because I'd read the Wiki entry on it (also meant to be a joke, although not entirely false).

Anyway, turns out I can win the bet. Online searching has become a valuable tool for my research – primarily, using the "similar to this" function. For instance, the function on Amazon which suggests if I like a particular book, I may like a list of similar books based on other people's buying history – I have located a number of examples I wasn't aware of using this. Also, on Wikipedia, looking at the suggested links has lead me to some interesting classifications of other similar types of literature, such as:

visual communication or design?

I've started writing (it's much more difficult than I anticipated, but that's probably not surprising to anyone but me) and I think I need to start blogging again to store some of the issues as they arise.

Today's quandary is whether I use the term 'designer' or 'visual communicator'. Clearly, consistency is key. Initially, I thought it wouldn't matter as long as I am explicit in the introduction-ish section that in the context of this research, I am concerned with print design, but if part of my argument is that visual communication design partly straddles the Humanities and partly straddles Design, is using 'design' weakening my argument? Visual Communications is just more wieldy than Design in a sentence (however, it will possibly significantly pump up my word count).

Cutting off a limb

After a productive meeting with Kate and Naomi at the end of last week (my supervisors - I find combined meetings are really useful at planning stages), I finally have a chapter plan and (relatively ambitious) time line. Until now, I had the research divided into two parts:

1. Theory – descriptive/analytical: history of illustrated fiction, describing the phenomenon with a typology of devices and taxonomy of their functions, which would lead to;
2. Practice – speculative/experimental: a series of workshops and projects exploring the potentials for this way of working to affect the reading experience.

About half way through the meeting, I put an X through Part 2. It was a big moment - I wasn't sure if I felt a bit sick or excited (relieved?). This doesn't mean I'm cutting out the practice component, but that I have to stop thinking of the practice as an entirely separate entity to the theory. Because there is so little consensus on what practice-led research is/could be, it's difficult to determine what is just practice and what is practice-led research. I had a go at defining this a while ago (talking specifically about process, not necessarily design outcome):
I'll come back to this later, it's obviously inadequate.

I have always described the research as practice-led (I identified an issue in practice - while working as a book designer I noticed novels with images in them appearing more frequently but could find little written about this). I have described some of my methods as practice-led (the current exhibition of books experimenting with different typo/graphic devices, the mapping investigations and courses with both writers and designers I'm running at UTS and through the NSW Writer's Centre). I have always intended to mount my argument as piece of visual communication design - arguing that word and image combine to communicate something unique in words alone is illogical.

But for some reason, none of these elements seemed 'enough' to constitute a practice-led research degree. Is this because what I'm doing is so ingrained, so logical to me as a designer, that I don't think of it as design? Or because, as a print designer, my work looks like the research process anyway (working on paper as opposed to, say, a furniture designer making a chair)? My favourite question when I tell people I'm undertaking a practice-led doctorate is "what percentage is going to be practice?" Well, clearly if a drawing is worth a thousand words, so if I did 80 drawings I wouldn't have to write any words at all.... How is it possible to put a percentage value on practice? Is a table worth more than a chair? If the book I'm designing is the thesis itself, how do I 'count' what I've designed?

Sundays - upcoming exhibition at UTS

click on image for larger view

Sundays is an exhibition of three books, accompanied by annotated process work, that forms part of a practice-led PhD through the School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney.

Zoë Sadokierski’s research examines a developing literary phenomenon: the integration of typo/graphic elements in prose fiction (novels with pictures in them). This is of interest to Visual Communication Design because it reveals writers working in a ‘designerly’ way: writers are borrowing techniques and strategies from the designer’s toolbox.
Sundays investigates how and why typo/graphic elements could be integrated into a short story. Using three different typo/graphic devices – experimental typography, drawing/diagrams and ephemera/photographs – three separate versions of the same story (written by Katherine Danks) are presented as individual books.

Viewers are invited to sit and read each book separately, then reflect on their experience of reading the typographic, the illustrated and the photographic elements in each version.

New Readers

"Not everything in print is to be read in a traditional way; there are new modes of reading which correspond to new modes of writing." Emile Benveniste

"It is my belief that, long before the constituencies of the graphic novel have finished arguing among themselves, the stragegies that have been devised for long-range pictoral reading will contribute significantly to an emerging new literature of our times in which word, picture and typogrpahy interact meaningfully and which is in tune with the complexity of modern life with its babble of signs and symbols and stimuli." Eddie Campbell (World Literature Today, March-April 07: 13)

Deborah Adelaide put me onto Nabokov's essays on literature, in particular an introductory essay called 'Good Readers and Good Writers'. I've been putting off dealing with the issue of the 'contract' between writer and reader for a while, but I have to start dealing with it as I write up my main book reviews. One of the most interesting aspects of this topic – for designers – is the parallels between the process of writing and the process of designing: the way a writer uses literary devices to direct the reader's experience is a useful model for designers to use when thinking about the way they use their 'devices' to direct the viewer experience. Again, back to an idea raised in Kate Sweetapple's PhD thesis.

Material writing

The Material Poem, an anthology of poetic artworks curated by UTS Masters student James Stuart, is available online: www.nongeneric.net

His introduction describes these poems as the products of writers "engaged with writing as a material rather than purely literary practice." Many of the poems are accompanied by author's notes explaining their motivations. Although I'm not looking at poetry (you'd have to go into a great deal of historical grounding to understand how the poem has evolved as a visual-verbal form, and I'm more interested in experimental visual devices in prose - traditionally the domain of pure language), this is a great example of how visual rhetorical devices affect the reading experience.

Quoting Charles Bernstein: " All text is visual when read", Stuart elaborates "engaging with language necessarily entails engagement with its particular materiality." It is this consideration of form, of materiality (or modality?) that is fascinating to me, as a designer. The 'design' of literature shifts from a paratextual zone (the cover, the typesetting grid) to an intertextual zone (the visual elements affect communication/meaning).

The process of reading poetry is recognised by the likes of Michel Riffaterre as being inherently different than the process prose: you read a poem once to identify the semiotic structure, and then again to understand the structure. You necessarily re-read poetry. This is what George Alexander describes in his statement: 'meaning in poetry often seems to float just out of reach, like lost paper sail boats'.

Wayzgoose Press describes the motivation to typeset one of their poems in differing faces and weights: "to encourage a slower and more deliberate reading than the average reader is accustomed to with today's universal emphasis on speed."

Action Research and design

I've been to a couple of talks on action research lately, and Bob Dick's 2001 (find source) description of what action research is could be a description of the design process in general:

A commonly known description of the action research cycle is that of Kemmis and McTaggart (1998) – plan, act, observe, reflect; then, in the light of this, plan for the next cycle ... [action research] tends to be ... cyclic and participative and qualitative. I view all of these features as choices to be made by the researcher, usually in discussion with the participants. Good action research is research where, among other features, appropriate choices are made... If its advantages are to be obtained, it is mostly or always flexible and responsive to the research situation.

If you replace 'researcher' as designer, and 'participants' as the client/audience, I think this is a nice working definition of what design (specifically visual communications) does. It describes an iterative creative process that involves cycles of designing, reflecting and redesigning in collaboration with the other people involved in any given project (in my practice, this would be 'planning' (brainstorming) based on a brief from an editor, 'acting' (designing a set of roughs), 'observing and reflecting' in collaboration with editorial and marketing departments (showing them the roughs and discussing), then repeating the cycle until a final solution is agreed on).

The other particularly relevant idea is that of appropriateness. Good design is evaluated on appropriateness. There is no single ‘right’ design solution to any given design problem. Unlike science, which strives for THE solution, design will only offer A solution. So whether A design solution is evaluated as being good or bad, it is in terms of how appropriate the solution is at that time – how clear is the communication and how engaging is it to the intended audience.

I can't see action research being entirely appropriate for my research, but I think it's a valuable methodology for designers who are researching through practice.

To come back to:

Are gimmicks and visual rhetoric the same thing?

if you define rhetoric as persuasion, false, showy, artificial... "Rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit" John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

I'm just starting to read around rhetoric (and its application to design research) - seems to be (appropriately) a huge range of arguments around the value of rhetoric as a field of study at all, let alone for design. The value of rhetoric for design is that studies persuasion - how do you communicate a message in the most convincing manner. This the fundamental purpose of visual communications.

The central concern of rhetoric has always been method and manner: how to discover the most effective way to express a thought in a given situation, and then how to alter its expression to suit different situations. http://lsb.scu.edu/%7Eemcquarrie/rhetjcr.htm

film v novel

"But most readers are also moviegoers, even if the converse does not apply. The interesting thing is that the same person who goes to see the film The Brown Bunny, and groans as the insects pile up on Vince Gallo's windshield, will curl up at home with Everything Is Illuminated and chuckle approvingly at finding the phrase "we are writing" printed 191 times in a row...
In short, two aesthetics often exist in the same mind: a moviegoing aesthetic that trusts primarily in personal taste and perception, and a reading aesthetic that is more likely to defer to established opinion."
BR Myers, 'A Bag of Tired Tricks', The Atlantic Monthly Boston, May 2005
"At heart, the two forms, movie and book, are irreconcilable. A book we “hear”, listening to our own reading. A movie we “see”. The images must move, clash and climax. Translating sound into picture requires the director to cross-reference senses. When you get a film/novel such as Perfume (smell) or Chocolat (taste), the book is always going to outstrip the movie – until the film of the future gives us smell-and-taste simulation. On the other hand, when the story moves into altered states (such as Altered States), the movie has the advantage. Film can deliver a stunning visual in a tenth of a second – think The Lord of the Rings, The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense and The Butterfly Effect."
Ken Russell, 'You've read the book - good luck with the movie", Times Online, August 16 2007. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2265338.ece

The limits of images

Marie-Laure Ryan claims: "the narrative limitation of pure pictures stems from their inability to makes propositions. As Sol Worth has argued, visual media lack the code, the grammar, and the syntactic rules necessary to articulate specific meanings. A propositional act consists of picking a referent from a certain background and of attributing to it a property also selected from a horizon of possibilities. Whereas language can easily zero in on object and properties, pictures can only frame a general area that contains many shapes and features...Pictures may admittedly find ways around their lack of propositional ability to suggest specific properties (for instance, through caricature), but there are certain types of statements that seem totally beyond their reach. As Worth argues, pictures cannot say 'ain't'. Nor, as Rimmon-Kenan observes, can they convey possibility, conditionality, or counterfactuality." Narrative Across Media, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

I'm not looking at 'pure pictures' – within my area of study, the visual always exists within the context of a written text (otherwise it wouldn't be fictional prose) – and I'm also not looking at the 'narrative' potentials of image ... I'm defining the typo/graphic elements in these novels as rhetorical (evocative, persuasive) rather than narrative (driving the plot) devices but the quote above is an interesting start at defining the limitations of images.

The ability for images to narrate (to tell: narrativity) is different than their ability to evoke (to affect: rhetoric)? I'm not suggesting that typo/graphic elements are always narrating (although they do in sequential art, but the narrative drive is to do with cognitive leaps the reader makes across the gutter ... see notes from comics lecture). Not about articulating specific meaning but about creating tone or evoking, the devices are affecting rather than narrating? To use design words, the visual devices are less about communication and more about engagement.

A picture cannot say ain't ... but through tone, texture, size, colour, composition, etc, it can imply a voice or a 'dialect'. Different typefaces, for example, can 'speak' in different voices: the manner in which a graphic mark is made has a language of its own - if I render a phrase delicately in calligraphic script or scratch it across a surface with a rough charcoal, it 'sounds' different to the reader. Using the media I have in my desk draw right now:

Design writer/educator Johanna Drucker sets her students an exercise in which they transpose the headlines of the Wall Street Journal and the National Enquirer in "a kind of design transvestism–so that the banner headline 'Bond Markets See Rates Drop By Slight Margin' took on a screaming impact, while 'Two-Headed Boy Gives Birth to Alien Savior with Telepathic Knowledge of Biblical Past-Lives' was modestly set in the grayest and least exclamatory of formats." (Text 16, 2006)

These examples illustrate the communicative power of typography – where the mode of expression impacts on the communication of the content. This seems blatantly obvious to a practicing designer, and I would think many contemporary readers, but this assumption is hasty. In a recent list-serve conversation, a design academic (I believe from engineering design) commented that he didn't understand how 'page layout' could be considered design. I'm not even going to grace that with a response.

In a recent Book Show interview with Canadian Arts&Culture Journalist Jeet Heer, Ramona Koval asked him what comics can do that literary fiction cannot. He gave an example from Spielgelman's Maus, where the characters are visualised as animals: Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, etc. He points out that this technique is goes back to Aesop's Fables, but here it's so effective because Spiegelman shows, rather than stating it: "gives you a sense of what it's like to be in a culture where these two groups view each other, or are viewed, as totally different races and difference species even ... so as a visual metaphor, and precisely because it wasn't articulated in words ... it's all the more powerful ... a picture is direct, it goes straight to the brain whereas a word always has to be deciphered - the word 'read' comes from riddle, you have to riddle out words." What's important to note is that the visual description evokes a visual experience.

He also discusses the recent controversy around the Danish cartoon mocking Mohammad: it created massive immediate controversy because it was so easily distributable (no need to translate from Danish) and re-printable. "A visual language transcends barriers of dialect or of history even." So an image may not be able to say "ain't", but it may be able to speak immediately beyond dialect? An international dialect? Obviously there are huge holes in this claim: there's a great Mad Magazine cartoon where a man in a kilt and a woman in jeans are standing in front of two doors with the 'universal' man and woman icons scratching their heads. But perhaps images can EVOKE a visual experience more effectively than words?