I am casting about for ways to combine words and images to say things about design. My previous two posts use the same tool (see plasq.com) in two different ways (while keeping the pictures constant) and found that each graphic style led the text in a different direction.
So now I come to you, my vast audience (pause, sound of crickets chirping) to ask what you think of each approach - clarity, tone, appeal, impact, potential. I’ll keep messing around with this thing, and I don’t really need to choose; I’m just curious about what you like and why.
Deb
Toby
Wordle is cute but not really communicative. Which of the plasq.com products did you use? I want to play with it too! I think it’s pretty effective, although the size of the image, given the constraints of this WP theme, is a bit small.
Also, apart from what it looks like, I want a lot more information. Where the heck is this place? You could add real text in a paragraph below.
One more thing: The problem with text in images is that it’s not accessible. People with images turned off in their browsers, and/or people with vision impairments can’t read the text. It’s just a solid image. That’s the reason for alt tags, i.e., the description field when you are inserting an image.
To continue: Big potential here — this is a great way to illustrate thoughts with photos, and to illuminate photos with writing. And now I really want to go to Opus 40.
Actually, I like how your experiment pairs the comic book style with the Mr. Serious style. The first post got me thinking about Opus 40 (where I’ve never been, so I may be a good guinea pig for your posts to experiment on), and trying to figure out what I could see from the photos that you tease at in the captions and bubbles. When Mr. Serious came on the scene, I got a fuller sense of what Mr. Lichtenstein had been hinting at. You’ve got a nice Socratic thing going on here, in a way.
It does strike me that being able to enlarge the pix would be great — they work compositionally, but more detail would be nice. Is there any way to click on each photo to enlarge it?
I’ve only been messing around with wordle for 24 hours (minus work, sleep, etc.) and I find that while it doesn’t communicate a linear narrative, it can, especially with the kind of tweaking it encourages, convey a strong sense of a text’s theme and mood, not unlike a half-overheard conversation. I’ll try to post some examples soon.
I used plasq’s Comic Life, downloaded for a 30-day trial, for Mac. I am interested in seeing whether I can put it to professional use as well, to annotate photos, plans, diagrams, and the like. It seems to support large sheet sizes (I set one up at 24×36) so I think there’s some potential there.
I agree that images generated by Comic Life may have some limitations online, both in terms of the way they handle text and in the size of the images. I suspect that, if I were to use it more seriously and consistently, there might be ways around both of those issues. If I make something I really like, I might end up posting an image linked to a downloadable pdf. And there might be some way to put the words into an html overlay so they’re “real” text.
But for the moment I’m interested mainly in seeing whether this has potential as a way of telling stories about design. It attracts me for two reasons: First, that it’s a lot like a slide lecture, which is a medium I enjoy working with and seem to handle well; and second, that it lends itself to specificity; not only focusing on a single work or image, but taking it apart and seeing what makes it tick. (Some of my earlier posts were feeling a little, well, gassy.) And third — ok, three reasons — because it’s sort of fun. I was never big into comic books, so now I get to mess around with them without having to figure out what’s up with, say, Dr. Selenium and why he’s so ticked off at Ultra Girl; or why TruGro ChemLawn is so afraid of Patio Queen.