Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Michael Twyman
University of Reading
Introduction
The main purpose of this paper is to draw atten
tion to the significance of what I shall call the
language element* in graphic communication.
Like most of the contributors to this seminar, I
have no time to do more than raise a few issues and
v
pose a few questions.
By the language element in graphic communica
tion I mean the relationship between information
content and its visual presentation (and, of course,
this must take into account the users of the
language, the circumstances of use and many other
factors as well). Let me illustrate what I mean by
two examples separated by many hundreds of
years. As it happens they were brought to my
attention on the very day I was pondering about
what I should talk about at this seminar.
In the case of the first example (figures 1-4), I
was in the position of a disgruntled client. I had
prepared a list of research interests of members of
staff of our deparment for publication in a uni
versity postgraduate prospectus. The copy was
structured on a typewriternot very elegantly it is
trueas a simple table (figures 1, 2). And the copy
was written with this structure in mind. In the
This paper draws attention to the language
element *of graphic communication. It is argued
that we need better tools for thinking about this
and related matters; models are proposed which
draw attention to general issues and aim to help
break down barriers between different means of
production. It is proposed that such general issues
should be discussed at all levels of education because
designers of graphic messages in the future are
increasingly likely to be non-specialists. Finally, it
is suggested that only in the light of a serious study
of graphic language requirements will we be in a
position to design satisfactory new systems and
make good use of them.
work as published (figures 3, 4) the copy was re
ordered as continuous prose without my know
ledge and without any more than a few trivial
alterations being made to the wording. You will
notice that I did not say without any changes being
made to the message, because it seems abundantly
clear to me that the message has been sufficiently
stifled as to have become almost mute. The signi
ficant issue in this context is that the precious
relationship between content and form has been
lost.