Can't Miss This vol. 4

As much as I would love to regale you all with my love of Saul Bass once again (in response to Eye's latest post about his work), I wouldn't want to bore you all too much. Instead, I'll be discussing their interview with Nick Felton, author/designer/subject of the Feltron Annual Report. (aside: why the R? That's just confusing)

The popularity (relatively speaking) of the Feltron Report is indicative of how much people prefer visual storytelling and the need for great design work. Many people, myself included, jump at the opportunity to read an intelligently made, witty infographic before a story told in a traditional words-first format. It is abundantly clear that charts, graphs, etc. (at least opposed to a narrative) are the only way to relate the information in the report without boring readers. For those unfamiliar, first let me apologize for making you wade through this paragraph with no idea of what I'm talking about. The report is Felton's statistical representation of everything that has happened to him in the past year, and it includes tons of small, fun details that would be dreadful to read were they simply written out. At the risk of sounding illiterate, may I just say that pictures really do matter. In any case, infographics can be one of the best, most accessible ways of telling stories because they use a good economy of storytelling techniques.

As an example, when I worked infographics for The Missourian, we created our own Feltron reports. At the same time, I was a department editor for Vox, so I essentially lived in the building (which was good because my house did not have air conditioning, and it was a typical Missouri summer). As such, my two-week report was dictated by Vox. Enjoy:

It's not quite as polished as I'd like, but, in my defense, I was a words person at the time. As you can see, this is a much more entertaining (I hope) and horrifying representation of my life at the time. Certainly you'd rather look at this than read a journal in which I catalogued my sandwich consumption habits on a given day.

But wait, there's more!

While facebooking this afternoon, I stumbled across Eric Skillman's design blog. Specifically, I came across his walkthrough of the creative process behind developing DVD case and menu screen art for the Criterion Collection. The draft process behind arriving at a final product totally fascinates me, because at Vox, our schedule is so tight that we typically cannot completely overhaul the concept, type and layout of a feature design. Here he discusses the changes behind the DVD art for Broadcast News and how each design variation moves toward or away from the content of the movie. He has designed several of my favorite Criterion covers, including Divorce, Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned (both commedie all'italiana, dir. Pietro Germi).

In an earlier blog post, he also discusses the design process for another favorite, Sweet Smell of Success. In this case, he collaborated with an artist rather than using photographic art from the film (as with Broadcast News). This post is fascinating because he talks about design that is both content-driven while also limited by requirements placed on the design. What results is a beautiful, brilliant cover. I'm so glad the cover employs the primary color palette of the movies at the time both because the movie posters of the mid-20th century are my favorite, but also because it suits the movie so well.

Also because it's a dramatic improvement over the current offering, which reminds me another reason why I like Criterion so much. Much like Polish movie posters, Criterion's designers frequently make film art that is not directly associated with previous promotional materials for the movie and instead are a much better, content-driven representation of the film.