THE PROCESS OF
ADVENTURES IN GRAPHIC DESIGN By Jamie Sigadel 1
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TABLE
of
CONTENTS pg. 4 – 5
INTRODUCTION
pg. 6 – 15
CONCEPTUALIZATION
pg. 16 – 37
RESEARCH
pg. 38 – 45
EXECUTION
pg. 46 –53
PRESENTATION
pg. 54 – 55
CONCLUSION
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introduction I’ve always been a fan of comic books. There’s something compelling about a fantastical storyline coupled with wonderfully illustrated imagery. While a traditional book transports you to another place, a comic book provides the visuals and everything you need to get there. In the past, comic books have had a reputation for being silly, juvenile — but have grown as a medium. Now they serve to communicatepolitical issues, inspire film, and more.
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During my time at MassArt, I haven’t been able to use my illustration skills for a project. I simply didn’t find a project suitable in which to truly excercise the skill. So when it came to degree project, I saw an opportunity to truly combine multiple interests I’ve accumulated. Creating a comic book has always been a dream for me. While this may not have been what I originally conceived for it, I feel truly proud of what I accomplished.
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conceptualization Before I knew I wanted to create a comic book, I knew my degree project would be based on writing. Initially, I thought I would design an interface to motivate other writers since I have trouble having that motivation myself.
When I did decide on the comic book format, I also thought it would be more of a hero’s journey kind of story. By doing research and having feedback from my degree project class, I was able to really focus on one clear concept. Over the semester, the project has changed a lot — but for the better.
However, through creating a mindmap I found a possible project that interested me much more. In my time at art school, I found that the more personal interest I have in a project, the better the result.
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brain-storming While still in my Design Research class, we were each assigned the excercise of creating a mindmap. We were encouraged not to decide on a degree project concept too early, but to explore the various possibilities of a given topic. This allowed us to find new, interesting possibilities we may not have realized otherwise. My mind map includes a variety of topics. From the main topic of “Writing”, I started by bubbling my favorite authors and stories. From there, I went to larger concepts — For example, I prefer realistic
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fiction over fantasy stories. Besides the area of comic books, I also ventured into film and other story-based media. My map also includes women and how they’re portrayed in various media. There were many different ways I could’ve taken this mind-map, but ultimately I was interested in comic books.
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why comic books Besides the fact that I enjoy comic books, I purposely wanted to choose a more light-hearted topic. Having already experienced two years of being in the audience of degree project presentations, I found myself less-interested in “preachy� topics. When it comes to trying to persuade an audience to make a change or be interested, I find that it’s more meaningful when on a personal level.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the larger issues of the world, the general public is less likely to take information seriously. For my project, I wanted to take on something that I feel would realistically make a difference. Starting small is one way of conquering much larger problems, and by using art as a means to do that enables larger possibilities. And in their own way, superheroes are saving the world all the time.
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re s e a rc h a b l e q u e s t i o n
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From the mind-map, we each had to write a researchable question. Writing this question is a way of further simplifying the idea from the brainstorming stage.
However, I was still very determined to create my first idea; the motivational writing app. But rather than settle on my first idea, I took the advice of my teachers to further explore.
At this stage, I was still very interested in mythology and its presence in writing. I was interested in how it manifests itself in writing over the centuries and creates a foundation for story-telling across different cultures.
In the end, after speaking in small groups in my class, I settled on this question which seemed to perfectly surmise what we discussed. Most importantly, I found a way of introducing the aspect of design to the project.
How can I relate Joseph Campbell’s term “monomyth”, or “the hero’s ourney” to design in a way that will ultimately aid upcoming graphic designers?
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p ro p o s a l
After defining the researchable question, we crated proposals to our Design Research teachers. The teachers would know what we would be starting to think about for our projects over winter break and the direction we would ultimately go into.
“Story telling makes up so much of our modern-day society, even if we may not always realize it. From television shows, movies, even magazines and beyond - we take part in some form of story telling on a day to day basis. Today especially, the impact of story-telling continues to grow with social media and the constant urge to update others about events in our lives. For me, story-telling has always had it's role in my life. Besides being a graphic designer, I'm also a writer myself. Like design, writing is capable to impact a spectrum of emotions and feelings.
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Also like design, there are certain conventions that remain timeless because they work so well. It's yet another way to be creative and expressive, with the possibility of relating to people in often surprising ways. The difference being that graphic design is visual and writing is not - at least, not in the traditional sense. For my degree project, I'm interested in bridging the gap between graphic design and writing. I enjoy both so much, but I haven't yet found a direct link
between them. Sure, there's writing on graphic design - but it's not the theory I'm specifically interested in. I've found that one media that does bride the gap successfully, and in an interesting way is the graphic novel. The combination of great writing and fantastic illustration can be extremely powerful, just how in graphic design word and image often works together. I'm interested in researching the format in order to tell a story that will directly engage graphic designers such as myself in a meaningful way. I would like to do this by incorporating elements of
graphic design within the graphic novel format. I believe the result will be an aesthetically pleasing piece of work meaningful to designers and nondesigners alike, inside and out.�
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re s e a rc h A large component of the degree project is research. In preparation, we each had to pass our afforementioned Design Research class. Using the same kinds of methods we learned there, we would be putting them towards our own topic of interest.
For me, research meant a lot of comic books. However, I also did more research into design as well. Since I was writing along with illustrating this comic book, I needed to learn how to speak about design.
The research itself was really up to the individual. This could include books, articles, films — whatever was appropriate to the topic.
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d e g re e p ro j e c t c l a s s Coming into the spring semester meant attending an entire class dedicated to degree project. Under the instruction of my advisor Jan Kubasiewicz, I was about to set sail on this new journey. The class is split up so that there is enough time for research and execution of a prototype. For the purposes of our degree project, it isn’t important to create a workable end product. It’s much more important to build up a strong, complete project and be able to present it.
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Most of my classmates agreed that having so much research without some result is disappointing, however. To be able to end on a high note is important presentation-wise. From the beginning, I think as a class we were determined to make a prototype in some form to be able to a more persuasive presentation. And it’s just cooler.
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checkpoint one For the first checkpoint, I was really explaining to Jan and my class my goals for the project. I started by reiterating my researchable question and proposal and my reasons for choosing the graphic novel format. I also began to define my audience, which at the time included:
I explained that I really wanted to produce a physical comic book at the end to be distributed at my final presentation. I thought this would ensure a connection between myself and my audience. It was important for me to get my audience involved as much as possible.
• graphic designers • comic book lovers • artists
The checkpoint presentation also included my research topic case studies.
This later expanded to include non-designers.
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the list Here is my first list of resources:
Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia by Bruce Murphy
The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design by Michael Beirut
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman
Chris Ware (Monographics) by Daniel Raeburn
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
Daniel Clowes: Conversations Edited by KeParille and Isaac Cates
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case study: adrian tomine I started my search by looking for autobiographical comic artists. One contemporary artist is Adrian Tomine, known for his work in The New Yorker as well as the graphic novel Shortcomings. I was interested in his artistic style which is very clean, simple, but very realistic. He is able to depict reality with very few line strokes.
I looked through a collection of his New Yorker works in the book New York Drawings. I also read Shortcomings, though I found it hard to get through because the main character is very unlikable. Oddly enough, I learned that Adrian Tomine is real life friends of Daniel Clowes, another one of my case-studies.
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case study: scott mccloud Scott McCloud is author of Understanding Comics, which is an illustrative guide to.. Well, understanding comics. It’s very interesting in how how he illustrates exactly what he is describing - a strategy that I tried to implement in my own comic book. By doing this, it’s really taking advantage of the format and what it’s truly good at. The way the information was more interesting to me than perhaps the information itself.
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However, there were definite concepts discussed in the book that were interesting to me. As someone familiar with comics already, the information wasn’t surprising, though it was still interesting. He often spoke about concepts I knew of but hadn’t thought of in real terms. In short, he showed how much I take comics for granted! It made me realize just how amazing the format is and all the possibilities it has.
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“I never liked Superman all that much. Whenever I'd read a Superman story I'd skim ahead to the parts where he was Clark Kent because that was a lot more interesting to me than when he was beaten up people, or just flying around. I could hardly relate to that at all.” – 26
daniel clowes
case study: daniel clowes Daniel Clowes is most known for being the author of Ghost World. He attended Pratt Institute and later created a comic-strip entitled Art School Confidential. His attitude towards art school is mostly negative. I thought it was interesting that his work Ghost World is autobiographical since the main characters are female. He based them mostly on himself, and yet, many of his female readers identify with these characters.
He began as an artist and learned to write comics out of necessity. His drawing process is mostly by hand with small fixes on the computer. I really like his style, particularly the way he varies line-width.
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c a s e s t u d y : c h r i s w a re Chris Ware is a meticulous comic artist, whose imagery particularly resonated with me as a graphic designer. He uses lettering and very specific color palettes along with his illustrations. Ware created the character of Jimmy Corrigan to “fit his moods.” Like Clowes, Ware also had an unsatisfying art school experience. More and more, this character took on more of Ware’s characteristics. The book Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth has many parallels to Ware and the relationship he had with his own father.
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Ware has a very impressive style and way of storytelling. He uses realistic depictions of time passing with the way he paces his panelling. His panels are very structured and often like infographics.
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case study: art spiegelman Art Spiegelman is a well known comic artist for his work Maus. I was actually able to attend one of his lectures last year at Northeastern. I’ve always been interested in his work because, like him, I come from a Jewish family. I had already read Maus by the time of this assignment, but I was able to delve further by reading his book MetaMaus, which is like the process book for his work.
As far as autobiographical work, he intertwines both his story and the story of his father in Maus. He even places a comic strip he wrote about his mother’s suicide in the work. When he first started Maus, he never imagined it would be as popular as it is now — it’s even used as a scholarly text.
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t h e h e ro w i t h a t h o u s a n d f a c e s At the start of this project, I thought I would model the story after the traditional hero’s journey. That’s why I read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces — to really learn what that encompasses. In class, we decided that it would be much better to focus on my own personal story rather than a made-up one. However, if I had more time, it would’ve been interesting to peruse what that could’ve been like.
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I think in the life of a graphic designer, it can feel like a journey at times and that there are definite parallels. The tests that we go through might not be slaying a monster, but it can feel that way at times!
“The two — the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found — are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.” –
the hero with a thousand faces
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the graphic design student handbook A publication by Computer Arts called The Design Student Handbook came out around the time of my research. I thought it was very interesting in it’s simplistic style. The neon orange cover is also a nice touch! A lot of the topics I had already known as a senior but would’ve been helpful to read earlier in my career. However, I did pick it up to read more about the self-promotional and contest sections rather than the earlier ones.
I wish something like this had been accessible when I was just starting out. It just made me want to create my project more. Even if there are publications like these, I’m not sure how available they are to those who are interested. And because this specific publication is in a more “fun” format, I would suspect others of a similar topic would be much more “dry”.
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looking closer: critical writings on graphic design To really understand how to speak to others about design, I picked up Michael Beirut’s collected articles on graphic design entitled Looking Closer. One particular question I had was how much of graphic design history to include. After reading this book, I decided it was better to refer others to their own research. Authors such as Tibor Kalman make the point that historical graphic design is often copied instead of taken inspiration from.
Some articles that stood out to me most were: Good History/Bad History by Tibor Kalman, J Abbott Miller, and Karrie Jacobs: Some thoughts on Modernism: Past, Present and Future by Milton Glaser, Ivan Chermayeff, Rudolf deHarak Drawing and Design: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Again by James McMullan
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“When graphic designers complain that their parents don't understand what they do, it used to sound like an innocent little joke, repeated to reinforce group identity; now it takes on a sinister tone, like a symptom of disease, grounds for professional counselling. Remember, admitting that there is a problem is the first step to the road of recovery.� –
on overcoming modernism by lorraine wild
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execution For this project, I feel like I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do from the start. The research was kind of the easy part in that it was supplementing ideas I already had. But given what little time we had, I was getting more and more worried about the actual production of my comic book. It was important for me personally to have a product as the result of all this time and research.
The actual production of my comic book started in late March and continued through April up until a couple weeks before the degree project presentation. During this time, many other things were going on, including an unpredictable snow day. The presentation ended up being postponed, giving me more time to work on my book — which I really needed.
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check point two For the second checkpoint presentation, I started out by reiterating what the project was, who the audience is, and how this would be accomplished. The important part of this presentation was focusing on what aspects I would focus on for the actual comic book.
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These aspects are: Prologue (my story) What is GD? Word and Image Form and Content Composition Typography Craft Technology History
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script For my project, the writing was as important as the illustrations. They have to work together in other to get the right messages across. While writing, I added two more aspects: research and teamwork to the original list. The script is too long to put in this book in it’s entirety. However, I want to emphasize my process while writing it. Starting off with my own story really helped getting myself started.
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illustration Another large part of this project is the illustrations. I love to draw but haven’t been able to show that in previous projects. If I had more time, I would’ve really concentrated more on the style of the drawings. But given the time I had and the means of the project, I chose a more simpler, light-hearted style I think would appeal to my younger audience. I also use more vectorized, straight-lined styles for some of the more technical aspects.
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The hardest part was really deciding how to depict myself. I think most people struggle with how to represent themselves in a way that’s realistic. Luckily for me, anything goes in the world of comic books!
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p re s e n t a t i o n The research and work of degree project ultimately leads up to a final presentation. This presentation is given to an audience of GD sophomores, juniors, and faculty. We would present these projects as though presenting to a real client. At the end, we receive feedback from our audience with the assumption we would work on these projects even after we graduate from school.
Having already attended two years of presentations, I knew what this meant for myself and my classmates. It can be intimidating to think of presenting to others. However, the closer the presentation came, the more I realized how it wasn’t that big of a deal. Having already worked on this project for a semester, I felt like an expert on my project.
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abstract To advertise our presentation, we each wrote an abstract. This would be printed out for the audience to choose from on the day of the presentations. For mine, I focused on the topic of story-telling which was the initial inspiration. Jamie Sigadel Title: Adventures In Graphic Design Subtitle: An Illustrated Design Journey
“Story telling makes up so much of our modernday society, even if we may not always realize it. From television shows, movies, even magazines and beyond - we take part in some form of story telling on a day to day basis. Today especially, the impact of story-telling continues to grow with social media and the constant urge to update others about events in our lives. Like design, writing is capable to impact a spectrum of emotions and feelings. It's yet another way to be creative and expressive, with the possibility of relat-
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ing to people in often surprising ways. The difference being that graphic design is visual and writing is not — at least, not in the traditional sense.
of graphic design in their day-to-day lives. AiGD realizes the power of design both through it's concept and it's overall message.�
Adventures in Graphic Design bridges the gap between graphic design and writing. Using the format of the graphic novel, AiGD is a series of comic books that teach non-designers about graphic design. This format enables communication both verbally and visually, creating a stimulating, fun experience. This both in the hope of inspiring a new generation, as well as educate non-designers about the importance
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poster We also created 18 x 24 posters to catch the eyes of our audience. After speaking about it with my class, I was inspired to create a poster that resembled an In Design document. I liked the simplicity and relevance of the idea to my topic. However, I also learned that a large, mostly-white poster is not the most practical idea! All-in-all, I was happy with the result.
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p re s e n t a t i o n And so it came — the day we were all waiting for! The day of the presentation. I was in room 629 at 11:30 for mine. Being towards the end made me a little anxious, but the more presentations I attended, the more relieved I felt. For our presentations, Jan advised us to think of a bigger picture. So for my project I focused on the presence of graphic design in every day life and the importance of non-designers to learn more about it. I use examples of bad graphic design to illustrate this, such as the infamous “E” in Stephanie’s on
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Newbury. From there I go into the conceptualization and research I did for the project. I talk about the comic book itself and a mock-up I created for a potential website component. I end my presentation with an overall message of the importance of art. Art is a language shared around the world, it’s a healing tool, and people need to appreciate beauty in the world in general. Art makes the world a better place for everyone.
Unfortuantely for me, not many people ended up attending my presentation. There is a little competition because there are 4-5 presenters at a given time. It made it easier to present, but I wish more people could’ve seen all the work I put into my project.
books! I think other graphic designers will probably agree that teaching others about our craft is important. Just getting our parents to understand is something we have to struggle with in our own experiences.
However, I did receive good feedback from those who did attend, namely my reviewers Katherine and Chaz. I had some good ideas suggested such as a series devoted to different types of graphic design. Overall, I received positive responses from my presentation and even gave out some of the comic
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conclusion Completing the degree project has been an interesting, sometimes overwhelming, but overall worthwhile experience for me. It’s great to be given the opportunity to do research and attempt a project that I am personally invested in. Having my classmates and faculty is also a great resource to have, and I’m so happy with the feedback I’ve been given along the way. If there’s anything I wish could change, it would be to have more time!
I believe that this project has many possibilities and can go in so many directions. While I can’t promise what will happen after I graduate from MassArt, I still believe in the importance of educating others about graphic design. One piece of feedback I received was to distribute these comic books at high schools. Even if it’s one small step, I would love to share these in some way. Just seeing the happiness of one person when I gave them the book made it truly worthwhile for me.
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colophon Typset in New Aster and Avenir. Printed at Massachusetts College of Art. All information written by Jamie Sigadel. Images are owned by their respective creators.
Special thanks to Jan Kubasiewicz and the rest of my Degree Project class. I’d also like to thank Joe Quackenbush, my Design Research teacher and all those who attended my final presentation.
featuring artwork by: Chris Ware (TOC, 29) Adam Hughes (5) John Bryne (6) Alex Ross (16) Frank Quitely (19) Adrian Tomine (22) Scott McCloud (25) Daniel Clowes (26) Art Spiegelman (30) DC Comics (38) Tim Sale (46)
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