Etiqueta: Donis A. Dondis

  • Why are comics and poems alike? Line and direction p3

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    ALWAYS HORIZONTAL

    Safeguarded by a really strict monk order, horizontality is, rarely broken in text with exception of a few covers and titles. Graphic editorial design won’t allow that much. Either because of tradition or because we; the readers can be really particular about what’s comfortable when reading. Europeans say sans serifs are the ultra comfort. Me, short sighted and astigmatic to top; I can’t read anything without serifs. It is easier for me to complete by Gestalt a shape that has bolder strokes in a side than a series of lines my mind will confuse with a block1.  

    BALANCE

    I have already started talking direction. Horizontality. Verticality. It all starts with balance. What’s the most usual position for a human body to be in balance?

    Standing up! Or asleep in bed. Horizontal or vertical, balance is all about what we do without falling. And yes, I’m speaking strange terms in a blog about writing fiction. No arches, no genres, no metaphors. Visual direction.

    … Then, the most stable shapes out there are | y _. Any shape deviating some grades from that and we will have unbalance. Unbalance is a disaster! It means STRESS. Consequently, it creates an illusion: movement. Shapes breaking this convention seem to be about to fall, therefore, we think they’re moving. Unbalance is the trick to create movement whenever we’re dealing with image.

    Looking at these vignettes we can notices how unbalance is not just a movement illusion, it also portrays emotional stress.

    That can’t happen in poetry? By creating spaces, we create movement. Spaces can break the balance if we know how to break it. Of course, the rest of literature media is not as forgiving when altering the balance. Text is boxed into a “text frame” with blank spaces called margins —oh, we’re seeing the contour—or columns.

    As you see, even the Futurism and Dada maintained the horizontal convention to a certain degree. However, they truly knew how to create emotional distress by challenging the verticality.

    Text, text has to be encased into balance or we will panic.

    Remember, this is nonsense and “Together, the physical and the psychological are relative and not absolute2”.

    Have fun thinking if you’re to use straight, wavy or broken lines. Have fun breaking balance. Pasto kalo.

    1. And I challenge anyone who says I’m crazy to read in a smartphone Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. The typography is gray and sans serif. If any of you can really read that in the default size given by Google Drive… Otherwise, start respecting the dull Times. ↩︎
    2. Donis A. Dondis. A primer of visual literacy. 1973, MIT press. ↩︎

  • Why are comics and poems alike? Line and direction p2

    grayscale photo of gray concrete building
    Photo by Pablo Punk on Pexels.com

    CAN READING’S DIRECTION BE ALTERED?

    Yes, by changing scale. Scale tell us what to look at first. It is the most catchy resource of comic visual language and of literature. It changes the literacy’s directionality by changing the relativity of concepts.

    When reading an image, it is not the vignette’s scale alone changing the reading order. A western comic and native manga.

    Scale is a concept attached to the size of the media’s surface. Just by changing the size in points of this line, changes the thing that requires your immediate attention at the time of reading. And, if I change its size to make the letter bigger by making it bolder, the urgency comes across faster.

    A ledger size billboard isn’t the same as a three line advertisiment. Dealing with scale, the ledger size is enormous; whilst the three lines thing is tiny. Pick up a commercial presentation card and three lines grow up in scale at the same time the ledger advertisent ceases to exist. 

    Such is the reason why, disregarding the system (centimetres, inches, pixes), the media sets the scale. In a comic —I’m aware Big Choma, they’re paneles, chomas or vignettes but technicalities are not urgent right now— our eyes immediately compare the little squares containing the drawings AND OUR BRAIN DECIDES WHICH IS BIGGER.

    Thus when we change the letters’ size —yes, point size— in poetry as Dadaists, Futurists or as Alfredo Ballesteros exemplifies in la clausura about Vicente Huidobro; we can see how this works. Size matters1. If not, children books, rarely but they do, make room for colour and scale variations; however, the horizontal line convention is something I have yet to see broken.

    TO BE CONTINUED

    1. Don’t misunderstand on purpose… ↩︎

  • Why are comics and poems alike? Line and direction p1

    grayscale photo of gray concrete building
    Photo by Pablo Punk on Pexels.com

    LET’S START

    The bytes of visual communication are: dot, line, colour, contour, direction, texture, scale, dimension and movement. It is from them that we start building up to get across to others in matters of visual literacy.

    Hereby, amen of the The neverending story1’s Alfaguara edition in green and magenta (is it the same in English editions?); plus the infinite universe of children book titles, we are to abandon colour behind in this odyssey. Most novels and poem collections are odes to high contrast in black and white. Thus, colour is not included in the shared features of comics2 and poetry.

    DOTS AND LINES

    ….Mmm. Dots are, as a matter of fact, the bytes. Lines are more like the kilobytes. Since lines are a group of dots one behind the other being perceived as something continuous. However, because it is easier to perceive lines, I’m not to get engrossed going deeper or I’ll forget the purpose of the nonsense I’m writing.

    Lines are so basic, typography can’t exist without them. Literature, starts with typography… Unless we start with analog writing directly jotted down into a paper sheet. Something very few of us get to read directly or even write this way anymore for the simple reason there are smartphones and… tablets. How many of you, dear writers, do actually take a pencil or pen? And this is not to shame you. It is just to state what we have started to leave behind. Nonetheless, in comic and manga universe, the exhibition showing off the original sketch is a lot more common than writers’ spider legs handwriting encased in a glass box.

    THE CONTOUR IS IRRELEVANT, BUT DIRECTION?

    Contour… Contour might be relevant for sequences. Dimension requires the volume illusion. Thus contour and dimension are irrelevant for the moment.

    Let’s talk direction. Can reading’s direction be altered?

    TO BE CONTINUED

    1. La historia interminable in Spanish. ↩︎
    2. That as long as we are not studying only traditional manga, always in line and gray tones created by textures or Modesty Blaise, the only western comic I’ve read in black and white. Superman, Batman… They are all (almost) always in full colour. ↩︎

  • Why are comics and poems alike? Visual input p1

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    <<The inclination toward wanting to connect the verbal and visual structure is totally understandable. One of the reasons is natural. Visual data has three distinctive and individual levels: the visual input which consists of myriad symbol systems; the representational visual material we recognize in the environment and can replicate in drawing, painting, sculpture, and film; and the abstract understructure, the form of everything we see, whether natural or composed for intended effects>>

    A primer of visual literacy. 1973, MIT press. Donis A. Dondis. Pag. 27-28. Op cit.

    SENSITIVE

    A poem is a close cousin to comic based on the sole fact that both, start by being an input. Visual or not, both require a sensorial perception that inputs information into the brain: fingers feeling little embossed dots, alphabets that require sight, lines that require eyes. Yes, I’m to force a little things. Let’s say those embossed dots are images. If there something as the image of spatial disruption in the gray matter of a blind1 person because, in spite of my own myopia magna, I can still see.  

    Voila, zeroth law. We’ve discovered the very beginning for everything.

    LITERATURE AND COMICS START both WITH SIGHT. And that’s nothing new.

    VISUALLY REPRESENTATIVE MATERIAL

    Sometime I had a whole entry based upon something Graham Dunstan Martin stated in Catchfire. If you may cause you have no idea what I’m speaking about, this is the entry…in Spanish. Unfortunately, I have had no access to any English version of the book to try and quote it as it was originally written. Una disquisición sobre la brujería aplicada.  

    Making it short; Dunstan Martin says magic works better in a “spellcast” language, for IT has to summon back taste, sense and image. Our mother tongue is nothing more than tossing coins into a counter. We use the word “butter” without tasting its salt, its grease, its calories. Nothing but a mere exchange of abstract ideas. However, take a language you don’t use (in the book the spell language hasn’t been really invented tough it has a brush of Latin) and you will be forced to remember everything there is to that being evoked. Such is magic.

    TO BE CONTINUED

    1. Blindness understood as any physical affection impairing the optical nerves, pupils or corneas and that; only so I won’t be naming each and every lack in perception ability existing in the world. A response to light, to summarize. And no, I won’t discuss the term to sugarcoat it into something inclusive just to behave derisingly and discriminative towards people who can’t or have difficulties to see and exclude them from this ideas I’ve been nonsensing about. ↩︎