The process of writing comics

What follows are notes and quotations from Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics. The book describes the art of comic books, but most of the lessons are also applicable to other types visual communication like charts and maps.

Definition: “Comics are juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Comics use iconic images: sparse representations of reality. Used to allow the reader to inject himself/herself into the narrative.

McCloud's triangle of communication types. Photographs on the left, written word on the right, abstract icons on top.

Most comics are along the bottom axis of the triangle (above), but there are examples of comics that fill the whole space.

Comics allow people to identify with roles and characters. “People in the 20th century don’t want goals, they want roles,” by McLuhan (1970?).

Closure: observing the parts, but perceiving the whole. Like seeing a character’s torso and knowing he has feet. For example: videos are a rapid sequence of stills, or rich color photos that are a bunch of little dots (like newspaper prints or Roy Lichtenstein).

The gutter: space between panels where the imagination works.

Visual icons are vocabulary, closure is the grammar.

Types of transitions:

1. Moment to moment (same character and scene)
2. Action to Action (single subject)
3. Subject to Subject (same scene)
4. Scene to scene (different characters and scenes)
5. Aspect to aspect (different aspects of a place or idea)
6. Non-sequitur (no relationships whatsoever)

How time works: divided panel by panel:

• Panel shape influences perception. Longer panels seem to occupy more time.
• Timelessness: long, lingering time. Usually borderless panels or those that bleed off the edge.
• Passage of time can be shown with “zip ribbons” (swish of motion).

How lines influence communication:

• Different types of lines can have different emotional and sensational qualities: passive and timeless, proud, dynamic, severe, gentle, etc.
• Subjective motion (subject is static, looks like the background is moving)

When thinking about the interplay between words and images in comics, there are several Word + Image combinations to consider:

• Word specific (words are dominant)
• Picture specific (pictures are dominant)
• Duo-specific (both words and pictures convey the same meaning)
• Additive (words add significant meaning)
• Parallel (words and pictures tell different but parallel stories)
• Montage (words are integral to the picture)
• Interdependent (both work together to tell a story neither could tell alone)

Process of creating comics (see image at the top of this post):

1. Idea/Purpose
2. Form
3. Idiom/style
4. Structure
5. Craft
6. Surface

What about Color? Color symbolizes certain characters (eg. Batman is always blue-gray). Flat colors emphasize the shape of an object (Herge’s TinTin comics used all flat colors) to promote a democracy of form in which no shape is any more important than any other.

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Those are my notes. If this sounds interesting to you I highly recommend reading the entirety of Understanding Comics. It’s delightfully crafted and a pleasure to read. Also, Scott McCloud writes on Twitter and on his blog.

Munsell Color Space. Image created with POV-Ray, CC license via Wikimedia Commons

Choosing colors for maps, charts, and infographics can be a difficult task. Standard software packages like Excel and Matlab have tended to offer substandard color schemes (though this is getting better) so it’s up to the designer to learn about color and apply the appropriate techniques.

This post will focus on color schemes for maps. There are several types to consider:

• Sequential – good for quantitative variables.
• Divergent – good for quantitative variables with an obvious midpoint (e.g. zero) and two divergent tails.
• Qualitative – good for categorical variables.

Given a sequential, non-divergent color scheme, Cynthia Brewer and Mark Harrower (of ColorBrewer fame) note:

Lightness steps dominate the look of these schemes, usually with light colours for low data values and dark colours for high values. ‘Dark equals more’ is a standard cartographic convention. Sequential schemes can be either single hue (e.g. same blue, with different lightness and saturation levels) or multi-hued (e.g. light yellow through dark green).

Background

It’s important first to remember that computer displays and common digital color formats (like RGB) only show a subset of all visible color. It’s also good to be aware of some common color spaces: RGB, HSV, and YIQ.

RGB identifies color by red, green, and blue components. HSV uses hue (angle on the color wheel), saturation (intensity of color), and value (amount of black). YIQ is used for NTSC television signals. It has a black/white component plus two chromatic components; the black/white Y component is what is visible on a black and white television.

Much experimentation has been done on how people perceive colors. Assuming colors are at equal saturation. “Value perception dominates color perception.” (Bertin, p 87) Images generated earlier on this blog tested color sorting across every variation of RGB, HSV, YIQ color spaces and confirm Bertin’s assessment.

Bertin writes, “The saturated tone is not of constant value but varies in value according to the hue.” This makes sense. For example, yellow at 100% saturation is much brighter than blue at 100% saturation. If yellow and blue are to be used in the same color scheme, we will need to compensate for the perceived brightness of the yellow by decreasing its value.

Munsell Color System

Enter Albert H. Munsell. In the early 1900′s he undertook a lot of research to understand exactly how it is people perceive color. The resulting Munsell Color System is a three-axis system that doesn’t conform to any standard spherical/cubic geometric model.

Munsell Color System diagram. CC license via Wikimedia Commons.

The central axis indicates the perceived value (darkness/lightness) of the color. The angular values indicate hue, and length out from the axis is chroma (intensity).

When choosing colors for maps and other diagrams that utilize a linear, quantitative scale, the Munsell color system would be a good place to start. ColorBrewer has great color schemes for maps, and all of them have proven perceptual merit. ColorBrewer is a great resource and I have used it in many projects. The only real issue with ColorBrewer is that it contains so few color schemes. Sometimes a designer wants to be able to match the brand, identity, or theme of a larger project while maintaining the integrity of the diagram’s visual communication. Working with the Munsell system should allow just that.

Looking forward

We have not tested this yet, but one could choose a particular hue + chroma in the Munsell system as a starting point, and work up and down the axis to find related colors that vary on perceived value. Additionally, one could move in a diagonal fashion, moving up in value while also moving an angular increment around the axis. This would theoretically accomplish the multi-hued sequential schemes that Harrower and Brewer describe in their paper on ColorBrewer (quoted above).

Potential Munsell color schemes compared with schemes from ColorBrewer

References

Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics. Translated 1983 by William J. Berg, originally published in 1967.

Mark Harrower and Cynthia Brewer, Colorbrewer.org: An Online Tool for Selecting Colour Schemes for Maps. The Cartographic Journal, Vol 40, No 1, pp 27-37. June 2003. [PDF]

Munsell Color System, on Wikipedia. Associated images at Wikimedia Commons: POV-Ray render and the color system diagram.

Bruce MacEvoy, Modern Color Models. 2005.

Color sorting using RGB, HSV, and YIQ color spaces

We recently needed to sort the pixels in an image by their color. On first attempt, we sorted by simple RGB values: first sort on R, then on G, then B. But it turns out there are many other possibilities for sorting colors. Every permutation of the RGB letters could be considered (RBG, GBR, GRB, etc.), not to mention other color systems HSV and YIQ.

To see all the color sorting possibilities, we wrote a Python script to try every permutation against a common set of source images.  Click here to see every color sorting option. Note that we use a Hilbert curve in the top set of images to provide better grouping of similar color values. The bottom set of images is linear and wrapped: left to right, then top to bottom.

Our goal was to find a sorting mechanism that looked pleasing to the eye, but of course the results are completely subjective.

• For aesthetics, we prefer the YIQ sort. It highlights trends in value change, but information about hue variation is hidden and sometimes invisible.
• To communicate more information about hues, HSV sorting is by far superior, but it lacks the pleasant gradient-effect of the YIQ sort.
• RGB sorting proves inferior to HSV and YIQ, though the results can still be interesting.

Also worth noting: HSV sort is excellent for grouping colors of similar hues, but the IYQ and YIQ sorts also do this well and they can look cleaner than their HSV counterpart.

(with thanks to Steve Witham for his Hilbert curves in Python.)