Words and Pictures

 Last Tuesday (November 2, 2010), we had a guest speaker come and talk to us future designers about his comic book about his mom titled, Mom's Cancer. Author Brian Fies walked us through his journey developing his comic book through the design process of creating Mom's Cancer, and beyond into his second book, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? Both works done in a comic book form, Fies uses the concept I'd like for you to focus on which is the correlation of words and images in a design setting.

In the first photo above (top), there are clearly more text than the second photo below it, yet both are easily read and understandable.  In Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 5: "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe", we see Scott announcing to the world, in four panels, that he considers himself the best twenty-four year old ever.  The next picture shows Scott Pilgrim's awareness heightens as he is about to get punched in the face by a speeding robot. He manages to sneak in one word, "Hey-", and you can imagine and connect in your own mind how that scene went all within just two panels. We can even switch it around to have the second with more text and the first with less. To make a good comic, where either word or image leaves off, the other should pick up. This means the words and image in at least two juxtaposed panels have to have a their own correlating percentage to send an understanding message. You usually cant have one without the other to get the full meaning but there are exceptions.

In this example, these juxtaposed panels show all image and no words. The message it is trying to communicate is that over the years, as television sets became thinner and smaller, man evolved into a more obese human.  It requires more strength to move a big T.V. than to move a smaller T.V., therefore ends up not requiring men do as much work as before.  Sometimes you do not need words to send an accurate message, or vice versa. An all word communicator is just text but an all image communicator is what C.S. Peirce calls a Semiotic, the making meaning out of marks. These marks would be either an icon (a readily understood pictorial), index (a direct physical relationship to the viewer, such as a fingerprint), or a symbol (an indicator distanced from the actual object, such as a cross to represent a certain religion).