Who needs Lightwave? Or, for that matter, Illustrator?
The ubercool Miranda Mulligan pointed me this morning at at News Artist Organization thread containing these terrific illustrative diagrams by Paul Duginski of The Los Angeles Times.
These are a few samples of an online slideshow that explains the meterological conditions that caused last week’s fires in Southern California:
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Very nice. The visuals are so clear and easy to follow. They remind me of the classic 1980s-era work by Jeff Dionese at USA Today.
And notice: No Lightwave was required. No Illustrator or Freehand was required. I’m sure there was some electronic enhancement used — Photoshop, perhaps — but for the most part, it looks like Paul used a pen and a set of markers.
Steve Cavendish of the Chicago Tribune wrote about these drawings in the NAO thread:
I was out there helping the Times folks and got to see it happen. It was pretty cool.
Paul had done the pencil sketches and scanned them in, but didn’t have time to color them that day (things were a little busy). So they went up in black and white with hand lettering in a slideshow much like you see in that link.
He went back and did the color, took out the hand lettering and replaced it with type.
Great little piece. My favorite part is the Firehose of God to explain the effect of the canyons accelerating the wind.
Find the whole slideshow — complete with captions — at the LAT web site.
Here, apparently, is the print version:
The lesson to be learned here: It ain’t the drawing program you use. It’s the story you tell. If we put nearly as much thought into telling our story as we do learning 3D applications and worrying about rendering techniques, our readers would be much better off.
You see a lot of this kind of stuff at The Hartford Courant, in the work of Jim Kuykendall:
  
 
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…and Wes Rand:
As usual, click on the thumbnails for a larger view. Or follow the links for their NewsPageDesigner portfolios.
Each of these guys tell fabulous stories with pencils, ink, watercolor and markers. No major amounts of RAM and long electronic rendering times required.
And, of course, any time I lecture on this subject, I have to brag about the work of The Pilot’s own John Earle, who won an SND award a couple years ago with this beauty:
A larger view is below, on the left. Click the thumbnail to see it larger.
See more work by the Pilot graphics staff here.
Hand-drawn can be a wonderful way to tell your story. Don’t count it out just because it lacks technological ‘gee whiz.’
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:02 am
It’s a great point to make. But I have known some very capable graphics people in my career who would have as much trouble picking up a pencil or a pen and producing those drawings you see there as it would be for some others to produce a Lightwave rendering. It would take years of training. It would take a whole new way of thinking for them. And halfway through the training to do it, they might very well wonder what any of this has to do with journalism.
Nobody would disagree with the idea that the medium must not become more important than the message, Charles, but if those drawings in those graphics you’re showing had been badly executed — or so gorgeously over-executed that they were utterly distracting — I submit to you that the result wouldn’t be a bit worse than some of the over-the-top Lightwave extravaganzas we see from time to time. It’s not the medium that matters. It’s the expertise with it, allowing visual journalism common sense to drive the bus, that matters.
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:48 am
For more of this kind of thing, check out the just published book, “Howtoons.” (http://www.amazon.com/Howtoons-Possibilities-Endless-Saul-Griffith/dp/006076158X)
Or check out their web site at http://www.howtoons.com. Great stuff.
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Just to clarify, the graphic headlined “Santa Anas may return, but weaker” shown here is a follow-up to the previous graphic. It ran in today’s paper. The original Santa Ana explainer was posted online last week and ran in print a day later. Both are by staff artist Paul Duginski.
November 5th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
It is wonderful to see artists’ drawing being held up as somehting good.
It was only a matter of time that the trend would shift. In the early 90’s we wanted the mechanical feel of software. With Lightwave we are trying to recreate reality.
With hand-drawing we are reintroducing the artist as an expert presenter, journalist and “artist”
Very cool.