Of Monopoly, Operation and other visual cliches
Alan Jacobson’s Sunday Best Front Page site cited the Frederick (Md.) News-Post for its centerpiece illustration of a Monopoly board. Alan wrote:
The newspaper with the best front design today is The Frederick News-Post for a deftly handled photo illustration.
The News-Post didn’t play games with its Monopoly metaphor. It was handled with aplomb, right down to the typographical details.
Find it in the archive at Alan’s BFD site:
http://www.bestfrontdesign.com/072207.html
Meanwhile, a couple of readers questioned that. Paul Wallen, design director of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, commented:
I have to admit that I’m a bit puzzled…
I mean no offense to the good folks in Fredericksburg, as I’m sure this worked for them. At the same time, the Monopoly board has just been done so, so many times that I have to think it’s even a bit tiresome for readers at this point. The execution is fine and I really don’t mean to criticize the work so much as say I’m surprised it would be preferred over some really smart, impactful presentations you mention here.
And yeah: Paul has a point. The Monopoly thing has been done time and time again. It’s a visual cliché.
But does it work? Does it work for this particular story? Does it work for this particular set of readers?
If it does, then good for the folks in Frederick. If not, then perhaps they should have tried something else.
That’s what’s fascinating about Alan’s daily BFD exercise (and NewsPageDesigner and the Newseum and the gallery here at VizEds, too, for that matter): We get to see work from all over the country, from papers and communities big and small.
The downside, of course, is that we’re seeing the pages out of context.
The Monopoly cliché is a common one. I’ve done that one myself perhaps four or five times in my 20+ years in the business. My most recent attempt was in December 2005. I don’t have the entire page, unfortunately, but here is my photoillustration:
Unlike the News-Post’s more recent illustration, I didn’t try to reproduce the precise typography when I renamed the properties in my piece. Why? I wanted the names to pop more. Not at subtle as Frederick’s version. But I’m not a very subtle photoillustrator.
I also wanted to take out all the text that I thought would detract from the whole. Note I Photoshopped out the text in the “Go” space.
Here is Frederick’s centerpiece again:
I like the Frederick page. The art is clean. My only quibble: I dislike how that little box on the right overlaps onto the illustration. I wonder if it would have been possible to consolidate all those boxes into a table or something to run across the bottom of the package. Then, you could wrap the story into two legs between the illo and the table.
Just a thought.
In some of my presentations, I do a whole riff on clichés. My favorite example is another game board piece: The sports injuries graphic I built last year with Xinning Huang. She did most of the research and drew the little medical icons; I designed the page and redrew the main art after we discovered that a photo just wouldn’t work at that size:
Initially, Xinning and I had planned to construct an illustration or a photoillustration of a football player as lead art. Our DME, Deborah Withey, however, urged us to use the Operation game board guy.
By the way, did you know his official name is Cavity Sam? I didn’t, either. He’s such an icon that you can even buy rip-off Halloween costumes of him:
Find it here:
http://www.costumesgalore.net/operation_game_guy.html
So anyway, we went in that direction. And we had our misgivings. Especially when one of our editors raised a yellow flag: He had no idea who the little fellow was. He had never heard of Operation. Luckily, he chose not to press the matter and the page ran the way we designed it.
And it received a pretty strong positive reaction. At our daily in-house “kudos” session the next morning, we heard from several staffers who said their kids picked up the page and absorbed the info. The familiarity of Cavity Sam made a page on common sports injuries a lot more accessible than we could have achieved with another illustration. And the fact that it ran on the back of sports – it’s rare we get an open page back there – meant that it caught the eye of folks who normally didn’t read sports.
The lesson for me was: Clichés can be a good thing. If they’re used properly.
This point was driven home even more strongly when I was serving as a judge for the graphics category at the Society for News Design judging last February in Syracuse, N.Y. One of the other judges picked up that very page from a table of entries and complained that it was a tired, old cliché.
At first, I thought the judge was putting me on, but he was completely serious. I asked him to check out the byline. He was awfully embarrassed to find me listed there. That’s why they ask judges not to discuss entries until the medal rounds, I suppose.
The page didn’t win a graphics award. But I got the last laugh a few weeks later when I was told the page had won an Award of Excellence for Page Design – my first-ever win in that category. Pretty good, considering I didn’t enter it in that category. Turned out, Lori Kelley, The Pilot’s most excellent deputy design director, had, on a lark, inserted a spare copy of that page into our entries in that category.
Thanks again, Lori!
But while that award looks awfully spiffy on my wall, my fellow judge has a good point — the same one Paul Wallen made. It is a cliché. Perhaps a time-worn one.
Here are a few other Operation game board pages from around the country. If you’ve seen any of my slide shows, then perhaps you’ve seen these examples before. Click on the thumbnail for a larger view. From left to right:
1. This was by the Merc’s Jonathan Berlin, back when he was still with The Rocky Mountain News. Find Jonathan’s portfolio here:
http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?UserID=432
2. Here’s one from Chicago’s RedEye.
3. This was by my former intern Lindi Daywalt of the Ft. Myers, Fla., News-Press. Find Lindi’s portfolio here:
http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?UserID=6377
4. Here’s one from Bob Schneider of The Reading (Pa.) Eagle.
5. Here’s another one from RedEye – this one ran in January. Note they’ve turned Cavity Sam into Cavity Samantha. Now that’s an Operation!
6. And then there’s this one, from Lauren Kuntz, a student at Ohio University. I spotted it in her classwork portfolio and asked her for a copy for my slideshow. Nicely done, Lauren! Find her portfolio here:
http://www.laurenkuntz.com/
And what do these hackeyed, old clichés have in common?
They work. They work for the stories they accompany and they work for their respective audiences.
One more point to make on this subject…
David Kordalski, AME of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, posed a fabulous question on that BFD page:
Question for discussion: Does using the Monopoly board (even with minor changes to localize) constitute copyright infringement? Can’t see how it would fall under fair use, as the story has nothing to do with the game, or coverage of Parker Bros. It is a gray area, though. Thoughts?
Nick Masuda, Managing Editor for Visuals of the Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal, responded:
You know, the same thing crossed my mind yesterday. We did a similar thing on our Perspective cover about six months ago and had that conversation. We gave a credit to Parker Bros., although we pretty much changed everything.
I think, in cases of mimicking board games, they are fair game. It isn’t something you should do too often, but people identify do identify with the image. You must make it your own, however.
Is it a form of free advertising for Parker Bros.? Yes. Has anyone ever received a phone call on this, from Parker Bros.? I think it would be interesting to do a industry story in Design magazine on how companies feel about the use of their products or symbols (example: Wal-Mart’s happy face).
Section 107 of the U.S. copyright law – commonly called the “Fair Use Doctrine” – lays out four criteria for determining whether copyright has been violated:
- 1. Did you use the material for journalistic or nonprofit educational purposes?
- 2. What is the nature of the copyrighted material? Fictional material, for example, is generally awarded more protection than is nonfiction.
- 3. How much of the material – compared the the whole of the copyrighted work – did you actually use?
- 4. Did your use damage the potential market value of the original work?
Read more about the Fair Use Doctrine here:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
And while you’re at it, bookmark this page from Stanford University’s Fair Use Center:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/index.html
See my previous post on this topic:
http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2007/05/todays-lesson-copyright-law-and-fair-use/
While newspapers aren’t exactly a non-profit venture — well, most of them aren’t; please insert your own financial doom-and-gloom joke here — this art is used as a visual metaphor in a newspaper, in order to make a journalistic point. On the back of sports, in the case of our Operation illo.
I didn’t use all the Operation game, just Cavity Sam. And no, I don’t think that anyone would rip the tearsheet out of that day’s Pilot and attempt to use it as a substitute for the actual Parker Brothers game.
Therefore I believe we were in the clear to use that illustration the way we did. If we attempted to make an electronic kid’s game with the art, or if we tried to sell t-shirts with the art—that would be an entirely different matter.
But then Tom Peyton, Visuals Director of The State in Columbia, S.C. and formerly of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, wrote at BFD:
If they wanted to pursue, Parkers Bros, they would have a strong case. Using the game/board has nothing to do with the story on the front… Even giving credit is not good enough unless an agreement had been worked out in advance.
How do I know? Years ago I made a mistake. You can learn a lot about copyright infringement when you cost the company you work for money.
You’re rolling the dice when it comes to other people’s work.
Rolling the dice? Game board clichés? Nice pun, Tom.
But Tom’s advice is important to hear. Sounds like he earned that wisdom the hard way.
So: What do you think? Should we all think twice before we use a game board motif again?
July 25th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Unless a majority of our respective readerships are reading Newseum and BFD right along with us, I hesitate to worry about clichéd visual presentations as noted in this blog. In most cases, these treatments are easily indentifiable by the reader and haven’t been run into the ground.
While something original would be preferred in most cases, I am not one to quibble with something like this that “works.”
I think the area of concern should be clichés and puns in headlines where something original and more befitting a story would be warranted.
Great, thorough post here.
July 26th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Nice post, Charles. I’d like to elaborate on my earlier comments just a bit.
4. As a native of southcentral Pennsylvania and former Maryland resident, I actually do know the difference between Frederick and Fredericksburg, though you never would have guessed it from my original post. Apologies for the typo.
1. I totally agree that cliches can have value. A cliche is just something that most people have seen or heard before. So they are highly recognizable, and that can be put to good use. I think the best way to use a cliche is to put a new or different twist on it, and a lot of the examples here do that.
2. I was not criticizing the monopoly illustration. It was nicely executed with a lot of detail, and I’m sure it helped tell the story that day for the Frederick readers. My only point was that I would not hold it up as the world’s best front page design that day, especially when there were some other choices available with much more originality.
3. While both the Monopoly and Operation solutions play on games, Operation strikes me as a lot more fun for the reader. Probably because of the cartoon nature of the character and the whole idea of a big red noze that buzzes. I say if you’re gonna use a cliche, go for one that adds some humor.