Keith Martin
With the growth of digital magazines, it’s time we threw out the design conventions of the past and created a brand new visual language.
How many languages do you speak? The chances are, if you are a born English speaker, you’re monolingual; when you travel to other parts of the world, you rely on finding people with enough English to help you out when you need the loo, a cashpoint, a beer or all of the above.
When I’m asked what languages I speak, I sometimes say that I’m fluent in both English and American. Okay, I say that just for cheap (and admittedly weak) comedic effect, but there’s a little more to it than most people realise. You’ve probably heard the saying that America and Britain are ‘two countries separated by a common language’; even with Hollywood’s best efforts that’s as true today as ever. Spend much time across the Atlantic and you’ll find myriad little oddities that trip you and others up, and they’ll be all the more unexpected because the words themselves are totally familiar. Often it isn’t even specifically what you say, but how you say it. The subtleties and the real heart of a language lie as much in the implied meanings that lie beneath as in the dictionary definitions of the words in a sentence. HOW we say something is as important as WHAT we say. The same holds true, in spades, for the visual language of design.
Graphic design is a language that most people can read passably well, albeit unconsciously and in the broader sense of ‘read’. The literal words in a typeset page are supported – or undermined – to a tremendous degree by the way those words are set and how other things are arranged around them. If this wasn’t true, then layouts wouldn’t be nearly as effective and everything could be set in 12pt Times Roman. However, far fewer people can ‘write’ this language well. Just like other more regular languages, learning some design basics can be done fairly quickly, but learning how to communicate clearly and effectively in a visual design idiom takes a lot of time and effort. That’s what design students do during their years at college. Curiously, most people who are fluent in graphic design seem to be poor to middling at spelling regular words, as if they’re focused more on the drawn rather than written language. That is with the English speaking design fraternity anyway; I assume it’s largely the same for designers in other parts of the world.
If you haven’t spent time trying to create your own graphics and layouts, it can be hard to understand the skill that goes into strong, successful design work. It can seem a bit of a mystery, but at the heart of it designers are simply trying to communicate, using an established visual language that we’ve all been using since birth. The term for this is semiotics; the study and use of signs and symbols as language and as a means of cultural communication. This discipline is concerned with the linguistic grammar, rules and usage of graphics. To be honest, most professional designers don’t concern themselves that deeply with this more abstract aspect of what they do. But as designers, whether we make conscious reference to it or not, semiotics is at the heart of the design process and how we come up with visual solutions and structures that convey meaning to the readers.
The dialect of print magazine design is well established. Whether you feel confident in creating your own layouts or not, you can flick through almost any magazine and know how to find your way around. We’ve all grown up with magazines, and while this field has been evolving over the years, it’s hardly any different from magazines of 60 years ago. Sequentially linear, bound down one edge, made from pulped trees – from type and image to substrate, nothing’s changed.
Web design is somewhat different. It helped push interaction design into the spotlight, but it is pretty much universally accepted that a website is not a magazine; it has it’s own furrow to plough. What’s really challenging magazine designers now is the birth of digital magazines. I don’t mean the Flash-based things with the page curl effect as the user flicks from one spread to another. Those have their place, and companies such as Ceros are doing impressive stuff with it. But that’s so rooted in the print medium that the core metaphors are holding it back from developing new forms of language. No, by digital magazines, here, I mean the new wave of iPad publications. Wired magazine gained a lot of publicity with the June iPad edition, but there’s a growing number of others, too. Prior to the iPad’s launch many designers intended to use Flash to produce their iPad magazines. The plans generally followed the same route; design then export from InDesign, pretty it up and add interactivity in Flash, then export to the final iPad-friendly format. Apple pulled that rug from under everyone, so the production route is still up in the air. Wired currently takes whole-cloth page layouts rendered as bitmap images and adds interactivity. Hardly the compact elegance promised by HTML5 proponents, but at least it begins with solid, trusted page design tools.
But all that, of course, is more a production issue. The semiotics questions lie in the design aspects. However these things are made, the point is that these new parts of our visual language are still being worked out, and we’ve barely begun. Like the car industry a century ago we’re in the ‘horseless carriage’ stage of development; we’re basing much of our work on the abilities and limits of a technology that it isn’t. How does a reader move around the digital magazine? Should there be a literal mapping of a set of pages to a more physical representation? In other words, when navigating around, if someone drags a full page to the right, then down, then left, then up again, should that take them back to the start or not? It doesn’t have to, but should it anyway? What about page height? Width? Hell, what’s a page anyway?
There are many more things to tackle too, we’ve just scratched the surface here. These really are interesting, exciting times; we’re watching the establishment of new sections of our visual language. It’s based on what’s come before, of course, but it’s not a simple digital rehash. This is a design development that we need to learn and, when the opportunities come up, explore directly and perhaps help refine. Even if you don’t see yourself working on digital magazines, new ideas in one area have a habit of soaking through and affecting others. As with web design over the past decade, twists and turns in the new medium can influence the way we express things in the existing print-based one.
Since graphic design is a form of visual language, this means any graphic designer is at least bilingual. Now that this form of communication is evolving faster than any regular spoken one, you should keep in touch with these developments or you may find yourself using the equivalents of ‘whilst’ and ‘thee’ in your graphic conversations.
As for me, I’m going to have a particularly linguistically-challenging time ahead of me. As well as trying to keep on top of digital design developments, I’ll be attempting to learn two new languages this year; Objective-C and Turkish. Wish me luck, and if you have any tips, particularly on the Turkish front, please let me know. In English.
