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SophEx Comic Final Update

In the final version of the comic, we decided to add in a recurring narrator similar to  

McCloud’s comic book avatar in “Show and Tell” from The Invisible Art: Understanding Comics (McCloud). We also added a background color scheme to the comic for cohesiveness and to make the comic easier to read. We experimented with the background color scheme, initially adding a red background to highlight the WPI red, but eventually changed to a greyish green background as it was more pleasing to the eye. While there is still some inconsistency with image style, having the recurring character and color scheme made the overall piece feel much more unified. 

We also worked on our fonts in the final piece. We chose to use a Helvetica type font for the narration boxes and titles as it is an easy to read neutral font which is good for an explanatory style. As discussed in Helvetica this font is also commonly used in marketing and advertising which essentially a marketing piece which sells the importance of continuing the SophEx program (Helvetica). For the speech bubbles we chose a Comic Sans type font which draws on the hand-written tradition of comics as seen in McCloud’s “Show and Tell” (McCloud).  

Finally, we selected a few spots to add the narrator into the comic frames as a call out to WPI’s Where’s Waldo tradition. By having good feedback from class, we were able to drastically improve our final product.

Works Cited

Helvetica. Dir. Gary Hustwit. 2007.

McCloud, Scott. “Show and Tell.” The Invisible Art: Understanding Comics, 2 Ed 1993, Kitchen Sink Press, 1st print: Harper Collins. 1993. pp. 138–161.  

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Design 3.1 Feedback

As I work on revising the comic from 3.1 to 3.2, I am trying to incorporate the feedback from the peer review process as well as my own observations of what should be changed.  There are four main areas of focus:

1. Create a more consistent style

2. Determine if the comic is teaching manual or a story

3. Add recurring characters

4. Minimize the clutter

Create a consistent style

Interestingly, graphic inconsistency was a specific trait that I did not like from the Appignanesi and Zarate’s work in Freud for Beginners. For example, as mentioned in earlier blogs, I did not like how the art style included everything from scans (Appignanesi 159) to realistic illustrations (Appignanesi 160) to montages (Appignanesi 163). This was a specific trait that I wanted to avoid, however, it proved difficult because three different people were working on different parts and there was not one source for illustrations. Additionally, there were no artists on the team and we sought to find stock images. Overall, it created a problem for our work and while we seek to minimize this issue, I believe there will still be some inconsistency in the final work given our artistic limitations.

Determine if the comic is a teaching manual or a story

In deciding the overall tone of the piece, we looked to the two McCloud works, The Invisible Art: Understanding Comics and “Google on Google Chrome”. We took our cue more from the “Google on Google Chrome” approach. While McCloud highlighted certain features of Google Chrome, such as using open source code (McCloud “Google” 2) there was much less emphasis on an overarching story.  In contrast, In McCloud “Show and Tell” chapter of The Invisible Art: Understanding Comics, there is a narrator that walks us through the history of how images and text have been separated and argues why comics should be recognized as a medium which integrates the two (McCloud “Chapter 6” 138 - 161). In our first draft we leaned more heavily on the example of McCloud’s Google document, which led to the comic on SophEx feeling more like a data dump than connecting with people through characters. The desire to create this connection is evidenced by the feedback requesting a recurring character.

Add recurring characters

Adding a recurring character will allow us to grounds the comic and will make it feel like a more connected, cohesive work. We believe one option to do this is similar to McCloud’s “Show and Tell” chapter of The Invisible Art: Understanding Comics in which he adds a narrator that leads us through the chapter (McCloud “Show” 138 – 161).  If we take a similar narrator approach, that would be one way to add cohesiveness to our comic.

Minimizing clutter

Finally, we received feedback that particularly page 1 was too cluttered. In working through the revision, we will need to pick the most salient examples of how life with COVID impacted the class of 2024 instead of trying to highlight all the areas. Going forward we will work on keeping things easy to read with the audience in mind.

Works Cited

Appignanesi, Richard, and Oscar Zarate. “Toward the 'Death Instinct'.” Freud for Beginners, Pantheon Books/Random House, New York, 2003, pp. 144–168.  

McCloud, Scott. “Google on Google Chrome.” Google. 2008.

McCloud, Scott. “Show and Tell.” The Invisible Art: Understanding Comics, 2 Ed 1993, Kitchen Sink Press, 1st print: Harper Collins. 1993. pp. 138–161.  

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A Return to Infographics

Today I revised and expanded on my 2.2 Infographic, with a primary focus on increasing the amount of information included from the study in the infographic. I had my own “Aha!” moment. Contrary to what I had previously always assumed, infographic does not mean “1 page”. For example, in my Livable Cities and Intro to Environmental Biology classes, the infographics were assigned as one page documents.

Livable Cities Example:

Environmental Biology Example:

While, this Design 2.2 assignment did not specifically call out a page limit, I imposed the page limit on myself.  When balancing readability, font size, and layout, the space constraints caused me to cut important content out of the infographic.

By moving that paradigm, I was able to put together a much more comprehensive representation of the study. For example, removing the space constraint, allowed me to look for more opportunities to utilize a graphical approach instead of showing a bulleted list. This not only provided a more engaging experience, but it allowed me to include additional information about the test groups that participated in the study. Additionally, I was able to increase the font size of the participant testimony to better highlight the humanistic aspect of the study. Because, as Dragga states that we must “bring humanity to technical illustrations” and providing more real estate to the personal experience of the “Aha!” moment allowed me to focus on the humanity of the study (Dragga 266).  

The most important take away is, don’t impose rules on projects that do not exist!

Works Cited

Dragga, Sam & Dan Voss. “Cruel Pies: The Inhumanity of Technical Illustration.” Technical Communication 48. 2001. 265-74

Helvetica. Dir. Gary Hustwit. 2007.

Tufte, Edward. “Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions.” Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics P, 1990.27-53.  

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3.1 Workshop Results

Today our group worked on our creative plan as follows:

Utilize Canva – provide more alternatives for comic style frames and creates a more polished feel than Powerpoint.

      2. 

Stock images – research Shutterstock licenses to ensure no copyright infringement.

      3.    

Waldo image – create an alternative panel to Where’s Waldo to allude to Waldo without using a copyrighted character.

      4.

Flow – condense similar or repetitive panels together, for example, combining the separate panels of dorms, rooms and lounges being closed to bring together as one panel / idea.

      5.

Researched and came up with image ideas for the Welcome week and Special event pages.

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SophEX Comic Design

Today I started the design 3 project.  Based on some of the key takeaways the from Design 2 project, such as the importance of planning, the team spent time on the storyboard and outlining what would be included on each page.  

In designing my 2 pages of the comic book on SophEx, I thought back to what made the McCloud comics so good and what made the Freud comics more difficult to read.  One of the key findings from those two readings, were that the more consistent art style of McCloud allowed the viewer to focus on the message without having to readjust to new art styles. By contrast, the constantly changing art style utilized by Appignanesi and Zarate required the viewer to make dramatic swings in thought process as each new style emerged.  However, applying this lesson was easier said than done.

Finding a consistent art style while finding stock images that conveyed a specific message was challenging.  Ultimately, after spending many hours searching through Shutterstock, I was able to find the appropriate images that were consistent enough to add to the message instead of detracting from it.  

Sources:

Appignanesi, Richard, and Oscar Zarate. “Toward the 'Death Instinct'.” Freud for Beginners, Pantheon Books/Random House, New York, 2003, pp. 144–168.  

McCloud, Scott. “Google on Google Chrome.” Google. 2008.

https://awwmemes.com/i/wheres-waldo-880a2af238ab4efa9fb8b3461fd8a892

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A Smooth Comic Experience

I looked at the use of comics in Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate’s Freud for Beginners and Scott McCloud’s “Google on Google Chrome”, to look for examples of how best to use the comic medium. I wanted to review these examples to help guide the work to be done in our upcoming design project.   After reading both works, what stood out the most was the comic on Freud did not flow as smoothly as the McCloud work. The following were some of the elements that impacted the effectiveness of the Freud work in my opinion:

.  Font style somewhat jarring

.  Jarring transitions when switching between paragraph and comic format

.  Some of the images chosen were sometimes unusual choices such as the scanned in shots of the Thinker in the Super-Ego section (158 – 159). The strange choice made the image almost distracting from the message it was attempting to convey.

.  At times had to figure out what the art was attempting to convey which broke up the flow of the content

.  The art style was not consistent which was jarring – from scans (159), to realistic illustrations such as the cathedral (160) to pencil illustration (161), to montage (163)

In contrast, the McCloud work on Google was an easier read for the following reasons:

.  Easy to read font choice

.  Utilized comic format throughout

.  Art style is consistent

.  Image choices support the topic well and were easily understood at a glance such as catching a problem early is backed up with the image of a fly swatter.

When laying out the comic on the SophEx program, I will utilize McCloud’s work as a great example of how to utilize the comic medium effectively.

Appignanesi, Richard, and Oscar Zarate. “Toward the 'Death Instinct'.” Freud for Beginners, Pantheon Books/Random House, New York, 2003, pp. 144–168.  

McCloud, Scott. “Google on Google Chrome.” Google. 2008.

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Games Are Art

After reading Scott McCloud’s “Show and Tell” chapter from The Invisible Art: Understanding Comics, I thought about how people still judge art and writing by the standards established over 200 hundred years ago. McCloud argued that comics should be judged as their own medium and should not be judged against by the standards set for art and words (McCloud).  

Video games, similar to comics are often judged by the combination of their lesser parts. In other words, they are judged, not as their own medium but instead by comparing the parts that make up a game to the mediums that have come before them.  

Game Music

Game music is viewed as a lower form of music than its counterparts. However, the music in games is as varied as music in life from quirky, fun music, to grand musical scores. Take for example, Persona’s “Aria of the Soul” which could stand up against any theater or movie score.

Game Narrative

Game stories are viewed as a lesser form of storytelling as compared to books or movies.  In fact, WPI is one of the few universities that offer a specific track for narrative game design. This is hard to believe for a multi-billion dollar industry.

Game Graphics

Video game art is often deemed a lesser form of art as compared to fine art and movies. In fact, the prevailing image of game graphics is still based on graphics from 3 decades ago: 8 bit and 16 bit.  However, this image is slowly changing. In fact, after Notre Dame burned in April, 2019, the web was a buzz about the possibility of the graphics of Notre Dame from Ubisoft’s 2014 Assassin’s Creed may be used as a model to aid in the reconstruction. While, there are a variety of reasons, from game play to copyright issues that did not allow Ubisoft to render a completely accurate model of Notre Dame, the fact that the realism and feelings evoked in Assassin’s Creed was so conniving that the world THOUGHT it could is testament enough.

Like McCloud argued about comics, we must also argue about video games. Video games should stop having an inferiority complex and they should stop comparing themselves to other mediums and instead celebrate the creativity that exists within the industry.

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Infographic Design Final Update

I have a new appreciation for what goes into creating an engaging infographic. Similar to fonts, infographics have always just existed.  Sometime the colors or themes caught my eye, but I never gave them a lot of thought.  UNTIL, I had to design one and design one under time pressure with competing priorities.

In our redesign, in trying to combat our prior issue of including too few details we went in the other direction by trying to include too much information and were then constrained by making something legible and that would fit in our space constraint. Also, integrating the realistic wooded theme with the data and text continued to be a challenge as the realistic image made reading anything too difficult.

 We finally landed on having flat boxes that were complementary in color to our theme in which to display our text and data. We chose a blue and green color scheme as blues and greens often represent nature and in cool tones to convey a relaxing mood. As space presented a big challenge to fit enough text to bring meaning to what was in the infographic, the font size was sometimes small, making it difficult to read. For this reason, we chose a Helvetica type font to make readability better. Due to space, instead of focusing on the people and where they went, we zeroed in on highlighting only two pieces of data, both of which highlighted the percentage of participants that experienced Aha moments.

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Back to the Drawing Board...

I grossly underestimated how large an infographic is. This is much larger than just one portrait shot. I had in mind this was like a poster and did not realize this was meant to be about the vast majority of the study. We were trying to just get to an overall message that could be taken from the study versus conveying the results of the study. After reassessing, we have determined the imagery should be less of the focus and we need to bring in more data in order to more holistically reflect the nature of the study. What we have at present, and the hyper realistic aspect of it is kind of distracting and wouldn’t mesh well with the data and accompanying words and charts. It would be like if Snow had used actual aerial shots of London and not just the map to track the cholera outbreaks. 

Time to go back to the drawing board.

Works Cited

“File:Dr. John Snow Cholera Map.svg.” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dr._John_Snow_Cholera_Map.svg.  

malpic. “Westminster, London.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 24 Dec. 2017, https://www.flickr.com/photos/138727991@N08/25389345158.  

Tufte, Edward R. “Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions.” Envisioning Information, Graphics, Cheshire, CT, 1990, pp. 27–53.  

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Visual Design 2.1 Explorations

This week our project was to design an infographic that will make people interested in a study about how people solve problems when a solution does not immediately present itself. There were three different types of experiences that participants had. The analytical experience where a participant kept thinking about the puzzle and kept getting closer until the solution came. The mix experience where a participant had decided they had tried every solution and that there was no solution and then it came to them, and the Aha! Experience where a solution seemed to come out of nowhere. The group discussed how to present the data and decided to integrate the idea of getting outside and taking a break which allowed participants to clear their mind in order to solve the problem with the three experiences that people had.

  For that reason, we wanted to show 3 different walking paths that then join up.  Showing that by taking a break in nature, there are multiple ways that a solution to a problem may present itself.  However, I had a difficult time trying to locate simple outdoor path images that didn’t feel like the rockets that were shown to the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster (Tufte). The paths started to seem distracting. I then changed the design to arrows, but the team felt that lost the impact of showing the link to getting out of the lab and taking a break. We are currently working through different options but landing on one design has proven difficult.  

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Effective Data Presentation and Climate Change

Blog 1

After reading Taft’s chapter “Visual and Statistical Thinking: displays of Evidence for Making Decisions from his book Envisioning Information, I wondered what other evidence is being ignored in part because of how cause and effect are not clearly established, as was the case with the Challenger shuttle disaster.  This led me to think about the climate change crisis. The scientific community is in agreement that human activity is the cause of global warming (Herring), yet implementing actions to curb the rise in global temperature has been slow.  The November, 2021 COP26 summit wrapped up in Glasgow, Scotland with negotiations resulting in pledges to curb emissions of greenhouse.  However, even with these pledges the world will fall short of the 2015 Paris Climate agreement to contain global warming to 1.5°C (Sommer). If scientists agree that we must contain global warming to 1.5°C, why is creating a sense of urgency so difficult? I thought about the engineers at Thiokol, who had all of the cold weather o-ring data and knew it was a problem to launch the Challenger, yet they could not convince the broader audience because the cause and effect were not clearly shown.  Could this be the problem?  Quite often when a natural disaster hits, there are general comments about how natural disasters are becoming more frequent because of global warming, but there is not a direct cause and effect relationship that can be pointed to, which allows the debate to continue in the public and among climate deniers. However, there was a powerful chart that Al Gore spoke to in the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tkDK2mZlOo

In this clip the correlation between global temperature and CO2 emissions is shown. The correlation is undeniable. This movie was released 15 years ago and there are still climate deniers. So, what is missing.  Perhaps it is the humanization of the data. As Dragga and Voss discuss in the chapter Cruel Pies: The Inhumanity of Technical Illustrations from Technical Communication 48, creating charts which don’t show the human effect of certain data allows the audience to emotionally disengage from the subject and treat the data like “facts just like all other facts – nothing special, nothing different” (Dragga). In the case of the chart showing global temperature and CO2 emissions, the is no attempt to bring in the human impact into focus, such as showing some of the island nations that are already being submerged. Of course, there is the problem that it is a politician delivering the message as well, which if we need to leave politics out of this debate, best not to have a politician as the messenger.

Works Cited

David, Laurie, et al. An Inconvenient Truth. Paramount Pictures Corp., 2006.  

Dragga, Sam & Dan Voss. “Cruel Pies: The Inhumanity of Technical Illustration.” Technical Communication 48. 2001. 265-74

Herring, David. “Are Humans Causing or Contributing to Global Warming?” Climate.gov, NOAA, 22 Sept. 2021, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/are-humans-causing-or-contributing-global-warming.  

Sommer, Lauren. “Here's What World Leaders Agreed to - and What They Didn't - at the UN Climate Summit.” NPR, NPR, 13 Nov. 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/11/13/1055542738/cop26-climate-summit-final-decision.  

Tufte, Edward R. “Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions.” Envisioning Information, Graphics, Cheshire, CT, 1990, pp. 27–53.  

YouTube, YouTube, 9 Oct. 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tkDK2mZlOo. Accessed 12 Nov. 2021.  

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Polar Escape Font Final Update

I found that writing the artist statement was a good test to see if we actually met our design goals with the creation of the Polar Express font as we had to put into words what we hoped to accomplish and how we did that through our artistic choices.

Artist statement:

The Polar Escape font was designed to evoke feelings of the 1910s era. Specifically, we used old train tickets as inspiration since we were designing for a Polar Express themed escape room. In analyzing these old train tickets, we noticed that they were often created with old typewriter font but the printing process created many imperfections that caused the ink to bleed and fade.  It is these imperfections that we focused on in order to evoke the era.  We were inspired by the Erica Ormig font which does a good job of showing the imperfections of the printing process. However, we wanted to also create a spooky feeling since this was to be used for advertising an escape room. With that in mind, we took the basic Erica Ormig font and instead of keeping the heavy feeling of Erika Ormig, we created a watercolor effect. This effect makes the characters appear wispy and spooky. We hope that you feel as though you have been transported back to a haunted old train station as you enjoy this font.

Polar Escape Font:

Polar Escape Upper Case

Polar Escape Lower Case

Polar Escape Numbers and Punctuation

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1.1 Font Design Journal

This week I worked with a team to create a new font that would be appropriate for Polar Express themed escape room that evoked the 1910 – 1915 era.  

I first brainstormed some ideas around what would fit the theme:

Ideas:

Cold – snow, ice icicles – snowflake and thin jagged shapesTrain – Industrial, Train tracks, Metal grates – dark, solid, firm, thick

World War I era – Patriotism – red, white, and blue

Light hearted Halloween Fun – Casper the Ghost; rounded shape

Engineers – precision & organization – balanced and symmetrical style

Colors – Red, Green, Blue, White

Mountain – Train crumbles apart, tension

Escape Room – puzzles, teamwork, problem solving

Next I looked at what fonts were popular at the time and Hobo came up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo_(typeface)

I then looked at what fonts were used in advertisements during the era.

https://advertisingrow.com/advertising/campaigns/vintage/vintage-ads-1915-jell-o-advertisement-illustrated-by-rose-oneill-jell-o-vintageadvertise/

http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2015/4/6/just-how-did-tobacco-companies-advertise-cigarettes-to-women#.YYC2RRrMLIU=

https://www.periodpaper.com/products/1909-ad-1910-locomobile-30-shaft-drive-brass-era-car-auto-transportation-ylf4-234137-ylf4-074

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laurelhurst_advertisement_1910-01-02.jpg

After meeting with my team, we settled in our using old train tickets for our inspiration. These old train tickets often used old typewriter typeface.  

http://www.trainsarefun.com/lirr/excursions/excursions.htm

The most important characteristic of the font that we wanted to mimic was the imperfection of the printing process itself which often showed ink that faded and bled into the paper, making imperfect lines. We located an inspiration font which was Erika Ormig and we decided to create our font using FontForge software.

https://www.1001fonts.com/erika-ormig-font.html

I was to create the numbers and punctuation. In trying to use font force, I realized very quickly that I could not create a professional looking font that would showcase our look and feel. I then switched to creating the font by hand and tried out magic markers and colored pencils, but finely got the best result using water soluble crayons. The crayons were easy to work with and allowed me to slowly create the overall shape and then by using a wet paper towel, I could blend in the markings to add the imperfections and bleeding.  This also created an overall wispy look to the characters, which gave the font a somewhat spooky, reminiscent feel.  

Overall, the process made me think through how fonts are able to convey meaning beyond their words.

[panzani-marketing-department]

Visual Design 1.1 Update

Me and my partner have completed our visual design 1.1. The process took a while but we are happy with the result.

To start, we researched a variety of fonts related to the prompt. For example, we looked up fonts related to trains, 1915, cold weather, horror, etc. We then chose a few of the fonts that seemed to emanate the vibe that we were going for. Two of our most influential fonts are pictured below.

Source: http://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58125128ff7c50ab8feb864a/1477680476810-VSV7EUY8EJQHL5NIH0SD/sparta-train-station-logo.png

Source: https://chicagothepolarexpressride.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/PEX_TitleTreatment_Chicago_1-1024x347.png

We then began experimenting with basic letters and came up with many different rules for our font. A few of the most basic rules are:

- the body of each letter (excluding ascenders and descenders) should fit in a 3 x 4 grid

- the vertical lines should be about one box thick, while the horizontal lines should be about half a box thick

- some corners will be curved or right, but the ones attached to long lines will have spikes attached to them

Based on these rules, and some others, we designed an entire lowercase alphabet. We decided we wanted the font to be thick and bold, since the situation is scary and also takes place in 1915. Furthermore, the spikes on the letters represent train tracks, and also feel cold like icicles.

Some of the most difficult letters to design were the e, i, and z, while the easier ones included n, l, m, b, d, q, and h. We noticed that we often only had to turn or flip a letter and we had the general form of a different letter, which was helpful.

Attached are some images of our work.

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for what its worth I really like the z you created in the end I think the serifs look really cool

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Leveling Up Fonts

Image 2:  1975 NASA Worm Logo In the movie Helvetica director Hustwit shows how societal preferences around fonts reflect the larger cultural movements of that time period (Helvetica).  While Helvetica takes center stage throughout the movie, some of the more interesting parts are when designers revolted against Helvetica.  One of the more amazing interviews was with a designer who discussed how the font Helvetica represented corporate America and corporate America supported the Vietnam War and that meant Helvetica, the font, embodied all the horrible values of the Vietnam War (Helvetica).  While the readings from Benton and Gutjar & Benton primarily focused on how typeface can enhance, detract, or influence interpretation of written text (Gutjahr), Helvetica highlighted examples of corporate logos and how font impacted the corporate image (Helvetica).  Since our design project this week is to produce a font to be used for advertising a spooky Polar Express escape themed room that evokes the 1910 – 1915 era, I decided to look at how fonts have changed over time for company logos.

Image 1:  History of Sega Logo

The first company I explored was Sega.  In looking at the font development, I learned quite a lot about Sega’s history.  For example, I was surprised to learn that SEGA was founded by Americans who provided products such as slot machines to the US milatary bases (Sega Retro).  It is this history that explains, why the first logo, for what was then called Service Games, appears to look like the American ads from the 1940s and 1950s that Hevetica showcased.  The 1945 Service Games font (Image 1) shows the same sort of script font that Helvetica showed in a Coca Cola Ad.  The next iteration of the SEGA font comes in 1956 when Service Games could no longer sell products within the United States and its territories due to a ban on gambling devices at which point the company pivoted to sell the devices to soldiers stationed in Asia (Sega Retro).  The new logo reflected this change as the letters appear to be reminiscent of 3D origami (Image 1).  The company was briefly a Japanese based company, but in 1974, SEGA once again became and American company and SEGA Japan was a subsidiary (Sega Retro).  With this change, the logo once again changed and was more reflective of American tastes as seen in logos such as NASA (Image 1, 2). 

Image 2:  1975 NASA Worm Logo

Works Cited

Gutjahr, Paul C., & Megan L. Benton. Illuminating Letter: Typography & literary Interpretation. Ed. Paul C. Gutjahr & Megan Banton. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001.  

Helvetica. Dir. Gary Hustwit. 2007.

Prisco, Jacopo. “NASA's 'Worm' Logo Is Back. but Why Did It Disappear?” CNN, Cable News Network, 27 Apr. 2020, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/nasa-worm-logo-scn/index.html.  

“Sega Logo.” 1000 Logos, DMCA Information, 10 May 2021, https://host.io/1000logos.net.  

Sega Retro. “History of Sega.” Sega Retro, Sega Retro, 2021, https://segaretro.org/History_of_Sega.

[panzani-marketing-department]

Maybe Invisible Typography Is Nice

In "Illuminating Letters: Typography & Literary Interpretation" by Paul Gutjahr and Megan Benton, they discuss how Western typography in literature has designed to be unnoticed by readers. In 1932, Beatrice Ward compared typography to wine glasses, saying that most would prefer a crystal glass to a gilded chalice because it allows the beauty of the wine to be seen, rather than distracting from it (1). The authors assert that typography is never actually invisible, though, and affects the reader's interpretation of a text even if they don't notice it.

Prof. Riddick already pointed this out, but I thought it was pretty hilarious how distracting and irregular the typography was in the scanned version of the text. My attention was constantly pulled back to the strange font shifts, and I realized that I'd never focused on typography of class readings before. This reminded me how typography in our literature almost always does go unnoticed (at least consciously) most of the time by readers.

Below is an actual video of me trying to read the text.

Sources:

Gutjahr, Paul C., & Megan L. Benton. “Introduction: Reading the Invisible.” Illuminating Letters: Typography & Literary Interpretation. Ed. Paul C. Gutjahr & Megan L. Benton. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001. 1-11.

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I agree that the font being messed up in every conceivable way was super ironic to the point that if I wasn’t told that it was I would have fully believed it was an intentional choice made to prove their point on how font impacts a text

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How “Sonic The Hedgehog” Uses Enviornments to Show Danger

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/sonic/images/9/91/You_can_say_who%27s_faster_in_the_picture.png/revision/latest?cb=20130202212644

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/sonic/images/f/f4/Scrap_Brain_Act_1.png/revision/latest?cb=20140311201700

The Power of the Visual in Sonic the Hedgehog:  How Images Convey the Battle of Nature versus Machine

The natural landscape in Sonic the Hedgehog appear in the early levels of the game.  They often show beaches or grassy areas.  These natural landscapes invite the player to proceed into the friendly environment.  These meanings and feelings are conveyed to the player without having to use words and texts.  In contrast to the early levels of the game, the advanced levels of the game appear in polluted, industrial landscapes which invoke feelings of danger; one senses they are in enemy territory.  While there is text that appears in the game that provides the name of the level, the game is not dependent on this text as it is the actual image of the landscape that conveys the most meaning.  

The ability for images to stand alone and convey meaning is different than experienced in most of Western society.  In Image – Music – Text, Roland Barthes explores the need for text to anchor an image in order to focus a viewer’s interpretation to the multitude of meanings and image can take (Barthes 40). However, in the case of Sonic, the text is not needed to anchor the player’s experience.  The player can immediately understand the more friendly levels of the game through the use of green and blue colors and natural landscapes as compared the dangerous levels being dark and industrial landscapes.  

Kress and van Leeuwen discuss the advantages of visual language versus verbal language in the book Reading Images:  The Grammar of Visual Design.  They argue that there are times that visual language is a preferred method of communication over verbal language (Kress 19). For example, they show the power of visual language by showing a Newsweek magazine cover with shows an American Flag image on a padlock with the text Will American Lock Its Gates? (Kress 32).  Similar to the Sonic game, the power of the magazine cover is not in the text but in the image of the American Flag on a lock.  

While the player is immersed in the Sonic game, the underlying message being conveyed is that nature is good and industrialization is bad.  The inviting early levels of play are in pristine, natural environments and the advanced levels of the game are in grimy, dystopian industrial landscape.  Without text and words, the player receives the message of the conflict between nature and industrialization without any verbal communication.  

That is the power of the visual.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text, Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang. 1977. 32-51.  

Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. “Introduction: The Grammar of Visual Design.” Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge, 1996. 1-15.