InfoD-Cafe: From abstract to concrete visual representations

[Swanson, Gunnar]

Deborah,

It's funny that your problems are in the lower right. (I guess some people just can't deal with reality.) My regional difficulty is the apex. I wonder whether placing all of these sorts of abstractions into one realm is accurate.

Scott McCloud's triangle/pyramid is insulated from some of your complaints by the fact that he is specifically categorizing imagery from hand drawn comics so he doesn't really need to argue about where photographs fit except certain sorts of photos as an ideal of a certain sort of drawing.

It's especially important to note that one doesn't have to address issues of the nature of reality or the reality of anything to note stylistic differences in representation. Comics are, you will not be surprised to hear, not always based in a balanced and reasoned view of the world. Some characters in comics are unrealistic in several senses. Saying that their depiction is iconic in the Piercean rather than McCloudian sense of the term does not mean that we need accept the destructive power of green kryptonite or the typicality of the chest structure of featured characters.

Scott's triangle works for images that fit into a simple scheme. He notes the tendency among comics artists to use multiple positions on the triangle within one drawing. I don't think he'd be surprised by even more complex mixing of schemes. Any analytical tool is a distortion of one kind or another. The question is whether the tool's usefulness is outweighed by the distortion.

BTW, Daniel Harris' assigning natural status to some colors but withholding it for others is a particularly odd bit of rhetoric.

Gunnar
----------
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville, North Carolina 27858

gunnar at gunnarswanson.com
+1 252 258 7006

at East Carolina University:
+1 252 328 2839 
swansong at ecu.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: infodesign-cafe-bounces at list.informationdesign.org on behalf of Deborah Taylor-Pearce
Sent: Wed 8/27/2008 11:06 PM
To: Discussions about information design
Subject: Re: InfoD-Cafe: From abstract to concrete visual representations
 
> there's no starting point of
> "pure" representation for me.

> I'm thinking here of Daniel Harris' jeremiad on nature photography 
[snip]
>	through which we look at our world. This lush color scheme
>	disciplines the eye, compromises perception, and ultimately
>	leads us to ignore or denigrate more natural colors, which
>	cannot compete with the brilliance of the pixel and the
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