Customer Reviews

Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language

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Graphic arts are keeping up with the overflow of information coming out of the Internet and other media. The growth and interconnectivity of the media, the complexity of the world, and the pace of change have all lead to a tremendous volume of information. Andrew Losowsky closes his Introduction on the note, "Visual storytelling is increasingly becoming the most effective way of finding order among the chaos."

Such storytelling is not like narrative--of graphic novels or a journalistic event, for example--but rather arrangement of the information making use of and often going much beyond the graphic techniques of bold imagery, bright colors, and linkages seen in the areas of graphic comics and graphics in journalism. As Losowsky also notes in his Introduction, this visual storytelling "gives us the tools to process, to look and to learn. Only then can we try to understand. The visual storytelling as exemplified in this volume is for comprehension of a body of information, not for popular entertainment as in the graphic novels or representation of an event or story as in journalism.

The hundreds of visual storytelling examples over every page are basically two kinds: a graphic image condensing multiple data or parts of a particular subject, or a grouping of condensations graphically representing the connections and sometimes the development of a matter or topic. Either main type can be equally complex, and the general artistic appearance is collage. Take away the text, and what remains would be collage of shapes, varying dimensions, and stresses. But with this visual storytelling of interest to marketers, academics such as sociologists, researchers, government planners, economists, demographers, pollsters, and such, the text is necessary. For the text not only identifies and defines the subject or interest in the ocean of contemporary information, but also gives a starting point for reading the visual images or pattern or commenting on these.

In the first section, eight leading visual storytellers discuss their ideas and work in question-and-answer formats with accompanying samples of projects. The second section--Part B, Visual Stories--catalogs diverse outstanding works in the areas of Breaking News, Science, Geography, The Modern World, and Sports for abundant additional samples for study. The diverse content spans contemporary interests from commercial art to academic, scholarly studies. The collected works reflect not only the vast amount of information in today's world, but also desirable and optimum ways for representing facets of the information so that it can be comprehended, relevant, insightful, and useful.