“Where there’s metal, there’s hope.”
Nettleham, Lincoln
Image credit: the-agent.uk
I spent most of my teen years in a small village called Nettleham, a few miles north of Lincoln. The bus service stopped around 5pm, and Lincoln was too far to walk, so evening activities were limited to whatever the village had to offer.
One of the things it did offer was a library. Not the biggest or best, but the place where I spent time with my dad, and learnt all kinds of useless nuggets of information about sharks and the Loch Ness monster (including one really odd account of a diver who found a ‘cathedral-like cave under the loch, in which several Nessie’s were living).
The book selection was sparse, but did rotate, and on one visit, I found a book that would inform much about the way I draw and approach design:
The complete book of cartooning, by John Adkins Richardson.
Published 1977
ISBN 10: 0131575945
ISBN 13: 978-0131575943
Although much of the technical information was out of date by the time I read it in 1986, this book taught me a lot about style and composition. I ordered my own copy from a book shop in Lincoln and I still use it regularly today as both a reference and a teaching aid. Put a pin in that, I’ll come back shortly.
I’ve been banging on about the importance of narrative and storytelling in design for a while now, but what does that actually look like?
How does one practically, on a day to day basis, construct designs that have a depth of narrative, and how does one explain the process in a way that isn’t oblique and patronising?
Anyone can learn the basics of composition - AI bots follow general rules of thirds and the Golden Spiral - the models analyse all those images that real humans have taken hours to produce and extract the consistent maths.
I've heard more than one argument that, since design can be distilled down to a set of mathematical principles, humans really are no longer necessary.
As someone pronounced whilst presenting a seminar on AI - "All artists are just copying each other. Nobody is really creating anything new and haven't for years". Ouch.
That's actually a very serious statement that designers need to reflect on. We cannot afford to keep design a ‘dark art’, and must find ways of showing the value of the human design process through transparency.
Golden ration in art and nature. Image credit: Wimal Perera via Medium
I'm a grizzly veteran of coin design, and learned the craft back when the process of striking a coin was more fraught with peril.
I spent hours as an apprentice 'tabling' incuse matrices - filing the steel tools into a domed profile to aid striking. I once obliterated Thomas Lipton's football team from a Matrix through distracted, zealous tabling. Cap in hand, I went to the Chief Engraver to report the loss of the tool.
"Where there's metal, there's hope", he replied. "Engrave them all back in. It's good practice".
Because the process of making master tools was so long and expensive, and the job of striking much less controlled than it is now, designing coins required a lot of technical forethought to avoid issues on the finished coin, such as ‘fishtailing’. The balance of space and detail was important because an injudiciously designed coin might cause ‘shadowing’ (the design on one side showing through to the polished table on the other), or too large a volume of material close to an edge might require increased tonnage to strike, shortening the life of the die, in turn incurring additional costs.
‘Fishtail font’ image: designsbyjuju.com
I couldn’t find an image of a coin with fishtailing, so I’m using this font to illustrate how the serifs distort at the tips.
Design composition then, involved a balance of creative thought and technical foresight, and my favourite part of designing coins was always the tricky juggling act to create a creative composition that also worked as a struck piece.
Technical limitations of striking are now much less intrusive. Laser engravers capture tons of minute detail and allow designs to be cut into pre-hardened, polished dies.
Digital sculpting allows a designer to zoom in to the Nth degree, packing tiny details into a design.
Technical freedom means design freedom, but this might not always be a great thing.
If one can pack a coin with infinite detail, there's no respite - no free space to highlight the detail, and the design becomes exhausting - like a Michael Bay film in miniature.
My take on coin design has always been that every element of a design should justify its own inclusion. A coin is too small to allow arbitrary design. Every mark has a job to do. No freeloaders, thank you.
If one is to cram a design with flora or fauna, then each element should play a role, right down to the relationship between design and blank space.
I always tell students to look at the ‘data’ in their brief, and use it to drive their creative decisions. Coin design briefs are often ‘data heavy’, especially commemorations of historic or scientific events. This data can drive design decisions in both overt and covert forms - i.e the stuff that the viewer ‘reads’ on the coin, and the stuff they don’t.
Covert design is my favourite, and I lament its decline. Time was, coin collectors thrived on showing their collections and revealing the hidden narratives - how the number and placement of flora reflected information pertinent to a design, or how the composition and use of empty space came from a mathematical ratio symbolic of the design topic.
The interesting thing about using data to drive visual decisions is that more often than not, the resulting visuals work well...erm…visually. When my students agonise for hours over a colour palette or a font choice, I get them to go back to the data, and use it to help them decide, even if that is as linear as playing with year dates as RGB values or grid ratios.
Often, a design works just as well with one palette as with another, but the palette that reflects the data of the brief wins out because it resonates and adds depth to the design.
Using the brief to drive design decisions across overt and covert elements, it becomes much easier to ‘sell’ a design to clients - to spin a story around the concept that marketeers love. It’s more professional to demonstrate the power of the design process from this practical standpoint than to simply claim that something is ‘good design’.
Which brings us back to John Adkins Richardson. This book contains so much info on how composition resonates with design, and here is my most-used mini lesson:
Richardson talks about 3 fundamentals of composition and how they change a viewers perception of an image (apologies for the slightly lewd images in the second photo):
Distracting parallels, tenuous contacts, and ambiguous alignments.
Richardson describes these compositional factors in terms of how they can ruin perception of an image, but they can also be used to great effect to draw a viewers eye through a design, or to symbolically reflect an aspect of the brief that would be awkward to include in a representational manner.
They’re also a useful reminder to consider every element of a design, how it relates to the others, to the frame, and how its placement enhances or diminishes the narrative.
With AI generated imagery becoming more sophisticated, it is vital that designers argue their worth in clear terms, and learn to articulate the value of the human design process in a way that makes sense to those who’s job is to weigh up the value of employing designers vs bots.
AI is very good at following the rules of composition, but it does so with no thought for the impact of those rules, or the context within which they’re deployed. Good designers adapt and adjust composition to enhance a narrative, not just to enable it. After all…
