Charles Apple

NOON WEDNESDAY

Peter Ong kicked us off this morning with introductions. We have 12 folks in attendance, from Malaysia, Singapore and here in Manila.

The room is quite nice, although the air conditioner is so loud that we’re forced to use a microphone. Seems a little weird with so few people. But it’s working just fine.

I took a few moments to speak about one of my pet topics: encouraging graphics departments to become more proactive. It was really more of a mood setter, a motivational speech. We’ll be touching on proactivity all day, so it was a good way to start off the day.

Peter then presented Javier Zarracina’s totally excellent riff on the relationship between comics and graphics. He made a great case that infographics are the natural decendents of comic books and comic strips. When you consider some of the wonderful hand-drawn examples Javier has done over the years, you can see his point.

Several attendees raised a number of questions that — to our great pleasure — will come up in the presentations we’ve prepared for the rest of the day.

One of the great take-aways from this segment: Sketching is a dying art. Learn how to sketch and learn how to do it on the fly.

As I type this, Kris Viesselman of National Geographic maps is discussing various rendering techniques for infographics. When should you use 3D art or vector graphics or hand-drawn art? The answer, it seems, can differ depending on the point you want to make.

In other words, telling the story is the important part. Your rendering technique should be dictated by your content. She showed several examples of pieces in which this did not happen — when the rendering overpowered the graphic.

She showed some wonderful work. But the most impressive stuff in her show was by Javier Zarracina.

Hmm. I’m detecting a pattern here. I wonder if it’s too late to add a few of his pieces to my own shows.

Curious? See Javier’s stuff from El Correo here:
http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?UserID=328
And find his work from the Merc here:
http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?UserID=4602

Javier, of course, is now the graphics editor of The Boston Globe.

Next: Lunch. And then I have two back-to-back sessions.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Workshops, Newspapers, Visual Editors, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.