Visual Media Storytellers
July 30th, 2007
User-testing terrifies me, because I’m always afraid that someone is going to offer mean-spirited critiques of my work. So far, this fear is completely unfounded. In fact, most user tests reveal very interesting thought processes. And most recently, one woman’s comment stopped me in my tracks and caused me to really consider my role a designer.
In administering the test of the recently live Journalism redesign, the webmaster asked one of the black reviewers if she was offended by my use of the OJ Simpson image. The reviewer shook her head. “Not at all,” she said, “but I will be if you take it down.” After a chuckle she added, “But I do wonder…I mean, it’s not really a great news event. It was more a sensationalist media story.”
The art direction for the website was not, in fact, great news events; the art direction was great news stories. The difference might seem semantic or negligible to some, but I think the difference is important. The event of Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder was not culturally significant—women are murdered every day in this country, and not a moment of news time is dedicated to these events. But the story of her murder is quite significant because of the way our entire society participated in the story’s creation. We watched the cop cars chase OJ’s truck down the highway. We watched OJ try on the ill-fitting glove before the jury. We stood around office coolers and whispered about whether Mark Fuhrman was really a racist cop and whether evidence had been planted. And we gathered around our television sets, glued to the screen, waiting for the jury’s verdict. The event itself was meaningless, but the stories we wove around that insignificant death, with the vast help of the diligent media, isn’t.
The media takes events, both significant and not, and weaves them into the fabric of our culture, and we allow those events to become stories in our lives. We let those narratives become intermingled with our own, such that the otherwise insignificant goings-on of strangers become important stories in our own mythologies. People remember precisely what they were doing when JFK was shot. We remember the reactions of those around us when OJ was acquitted. While the president’s assassination is certainly more culturally relevant than the OJ murder case, neither of these events would have impacted us as a society the way they did were it not for the clever voices of the media. For better or for worse, we are manipulated by the emotive stories, the evocative images, and the cloying speeches of those who would bend our ear (and our dollar, and our vote) to their narrative.
Insignificant events, when relayed by the increasingly creative and manipulative media, become cultural stories. These messages are powerful. These stories shape our lives. The storytellers and the bards, dressed in many kinds of sheep’s clothing, are powerful people, indeed.
But what’s more, they could be me. They could be you. They could be any and every designer who sets symbols and images in front of our collective, societal eyes. The potential exists; we only have to begin to see ourselves in this capacity.
In the movie Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter tell Agent Starling that “we covet what we see every day.” This is primarily how advertising works. Ad agencies inundate us with larger than life images, and before long we find ourselves wanting myriad items we don’t need and didn’t care about months before. But one doesn’t have to be an ad designer to harness the power of provocative imagery. Though perhaps more subtle, every visual designer, from the web designer to the book designer, to the fashion designer, has the opportunity to influence the viewing public by weaving stories from cultural symbols, by carefully manipulating the narrative we present.
As I’ve written elsewhere, designers have an obligation to the cultures they serve and create. The symbols that we portray are affected not only by the connotations the viewer already had about them, but also by the context in which those symbols are presented. Journalists know this—this is how they are able to take an insignificant occurrence and turn it into a front-page headline. So how do we take the seemingly insignificant—the balding clerk, the fat housewife, the pregnant teenager—and incorporate these images into mainstream media in everyday circumstances? How do we, in other words, take these throw-away symbols and make them into cultural stories?
The dangers in working with imagery like this are sensationalism and romanticism. Nobody is served by presenting the unseen in glamorous, unrealistic ways. That isn’t the goal. The goal is to uncover these symbols, to present them as real and appropriately visible, and to reveal them in a way that encourages people to want to look. We’ve been so conditioned to only want to look at that which is slender, sleek, beautiful, hip. We’re not schooled to look at the average, to really consider it for what it is. When we are asked to look at something ugly, it is often presented in a romanticized light. Some things are simply ugly, but their ugliness does not negate their value. There is a real danger, I think, in the media’s encouragement of a homogeneous standard of beauty because it pushes the great majority of us—and of life—into the wings to be ignored. It devalues us. It belittles us. We become invisible.
We covet what we see everyday. And those of us in the business of designing and determining what our culture sees every day are in a powerful position. But how many of us are rising to the challenge? How many of us are using our skills and positions to challenge the stats quo? Are enough designers fighting the good ethical fight to sway our culture toward a larger vision of beauty, or even better, toward unveiling the invisible, beautiful or not?