My latest Huffington Post article talks about how we need five communication literacies to capture and hold people’s attention in a pretty communication-saturated world .
When telling stories, I throw myself into them! (Photo by Gregoire Seyrig)
Latest
UPI, old technologies and my only Titanic graphic (not 100 years ago, but close! ;)
Me at UPI in 1985 in Wash., D.C.
So, the Titanic sank 100 years ago, and it feels like that long ago since I made my only Titanic graphic! So much has changed in how we do them.
I was working for the wire service United Press International in 1985 when they discovered the wreck of the Titanic. Prior to the 80s, UPI was pretty big with thousands of media subscribers and nearly 100 news bureaus around the world. Back then, UPI was to the Associated Press what Newsweek was to Time and Avis to Hertz: a pain in their bigger competitor’s arse. Things began to go badly in the 80s when newsprint costs skyrocketed and newspapers had to cut back one of their costly news agencies (most took both) and by 1985 UPI had already declared bankruptcy once. Before I left in 1986 I had worked under four Presidents and three owners.
My job was to create news graphics for these subscribers as fast as was humanly possible. If you think news magazines have it rough with their weekly deadlines or newspapers with their daily deadlines, think again. We had deadlines every minute. At any given moment some news organization was on deadline somewhere in the world, and they were constantly calling my department to find out if a graphic would be ready before they had to put their publication to bed. Being in New York, we shot for East coast deadlines first and when we missed those, we we went West with the sun: Central, then Mountain and if we were really late we hoped to make Pacific (Hawaii anyone?).
Notice the drafting pens and cigarettes!
Breaking news graphics were always fun to tackle, particularly back then. You had to really work for your content. Information and visual references were often scarce and there was no internet to go running to. If phone calls and faxes (we got one of the company’s first, in 1980) weren’t doing the trick for you, you took off for book stores, libraries, government agencies…EVERYTHING, in a cab!
So, after telling you all this, I don’t recall how I got my reference for my Titanic graphic, but I do know that it was done in a matter of hours, early enough to make EASTERN deadlines! This was all done with non-repro blue pencils and rulers for drawing its single-point perspective (here’s my video tutorial on perspective, which is approaching 1,000000 views!), Rapidograph pens, ruling tapes and and an Apple Lisa computer hooked up to a typesetter. The final ‘mechanical’ was then shot under a stat camera, captioned (typed with a manual typewriter onto sticky paper, which was then peeled and stuck onto the print) and transmitted to subscribers using the Unifax II photo system. Great for photos but just awful for graphics. They came out a bit blurry on the other side, so graphics had to have large type and be almost all black and white, with very little pattern tints on them. Still, we did all right.
Do you tell stories the way you sing Karoke? Three things that can help.
So, if anyone can tell a story, what’s the big deal? Well, we can all sing, too, but have you every heard your buddies on karaoke night at your local bar? Ouch!
My latest Huffington Post article is about telling better stories to help you get a job, sell an idea, convince people to donate and about a million other things in life.
That’s me (long time ago), on the left with the toy rifle, telling stories around the campfire…
Like this:
Bar, pie and line charts explained
I made this for my students to help them understand when to use which graph.
The Newsweek Infographic That Made Me Cry
I only cried a three times during my 28-year journalism career. Two times were sparked by tragedy and the third was because of this !%&$#!#!! graphic.
In 1999 I was invited to a meeting in Newsweek managing editor, Jon Meacham’s, office to discuss a double gatefold (two pages that unfold to open into a four-page spread) to kick off the primaries for the following week’s election issue. A few others were there, including political reporter Jonathan Alter, National News Editor Tom Watson and AME for Design, Lynn Staley. These monster information graphics were printed on Friday night, a day before the rest of the magazine went to bed, to prevent a bottleneck at the presses.
SWIMMING IN CONTENT
I was the Director of Information Graphics and my dept. would be producing it over the course of four days. As we brainstormed ideas for content, I doodled in the margins of my notebook (below) as everyone tossed out their wish lists for content. The final list:
- explain for each party’s challenges and a key issue that the Republican and Democratic candidates would need to address in each state (that’s 100 text blocks!)
- profile the frontrunners on each side
- explain Super Tuesday and Southern Tuesday
- what are key states to win and why
- include a glossary to define terms like ‘superdelegate’
- show a timeline of when each state is holding it’s primary or caucus
- show the number of delegates in each state and break down how many were pledged to a candidate or were superdelegates
- profile the Republican and Democratic conventions: how many delegates would be needed to win the nomination, where are they being held, when, etc.
- WHEW……
- oh wait! Don’t forget the Reform party. Explain their convention and candidates
With such a hodgepodge of elements, I needed a framework that would, in effect, take the reader by the hand and lead them though it all. For the first time in my career, I used the a game board approach, something I had always avoided and felt was a cliché.
So sue me.
Lynn Staley brought in the great caricature artist (and terrific guy) John Kascht, from Washington, D.C., to do the illustrations. We put him up at the uber-fancy Essex House hotel on New York’s Central Park West a few blocks away (I stayed there hundreds of glorious nights during my decade at Newsweek when deadlines prevented me from getting home to Connecticut) and, though we had an office set aside for him to use at Newsweek, he preferred to work from his hotel room (it DOES have sweeping views of Central Park… and room service!). As usual, he did a wonderful job, particularly on such a tight deadline.
SO, ABOUT THIS CRYING THING
Managing Editor Meacham had stopped by my office on Friday when the graphic was due to make sure that it would be at the printer by midnight. Being late was not an option. At 11 p.m. the graphic was done and I was relaxed and thinking about heading home.
The gatefold was moving along the proofing and copy-desk pipeline as I tweaked minor details in QuarkXpress and Adobe Illustrator, like fine-tuning the rotation of the 100 text blocks and gently nudging the .5 line of the timeline and the circular icons that paralleled the game board.
I GET BAD NEWS
Just then, one of our graphics researchers came into my office and said,
“Karl, it seems they’ve updated the Democratic timeline and some of the states have switched around.”
Say what?
I thought, in a panic, that even if only one state was out of place it would mean that half the graphic would need a complete makeover! The state would have to wedge it in between two other states and slide all of the others around the game board to make room. Icons would have to move, all the text blocks would have to be carefully rotated into precise position and the timeline would have to be completely re-done. My blood drained.
“How many states?” I asked.
“Eleven.”
“WHAT? How could we not know this?”
It was true. My fight or flight response immediately kicked in and my senses sharped, anticipating the brain challenge ahead. I flew to the door and called in our intern, Stephen Totilo, who was about as intelligent as a human being gets, and sat him next to me, asking him to help me solve this puzzle and tell me where each state was supposed to be. He was brilliant.
“Move Alabama up here…slide Montana down here…insert California here….”
At midnight, Meacham came in and asked if we were done with the gatefold. I told him. Without expression, he said,
“Just come find me when it’s done.”
My boss, Lynn Staley, came in awhile later with a look of unbridled concern on her face.
“What’s happening?”
THEN, I GET WORSE NEWS
Two hours later, at about 1:30 a.m., an hour and a half past deadline, we were still working on it when the researcher came in and said,
“Uh, Karl, it looks like we have the SAME ISSUE for the Republican side.”
I stared at the researcher as resignation washed over me and my body went limp. Fire me now. No, forget it, I’ll just quit my job. Being late meant that there would be a bottleneck which would delay the printing of Newsweek and, since the same trucks around the country delivered Time and a jillion other magazines, it would delay their delivery, too, as drivers waited around earning overtime.
All because of me.
But this graphic wasn’t going to get done by itself, so Stephen and I kept slugging away at this train wreck, struggling to re-d0 in hours what had initially taken four days to do. My stress level was at an all-time high. As the hours passed, the world around me vanished, except for the God-like voice of Stephen the Intern and the minutia of the graphic on my monitor. There could not be a single error on this spread. My body was stiff as I mechanically obeyed the orders that were barking in my ear.
Lynn and I during a more relaxed time.
At about 3:30 a.m. Lynn burst into my office with the suddenness of Kramer entering Seinfeld’s apartment.
“What’s happening here??”
And that’s when it happened. As I spun my chair around to face her I said, choked up by my own words and tears firing at her with the explosive power of SCUD missiles,
“This thing is all FUCKED UP!”
And I swung around right back to work. Realizing the best action was no action, Lynn returned to her office. At 5 a.m., with briefcase in hand and Humphrey Bogart raincoat tied at the waist, Meacham popped his head in the door and said,
“I”ll be in my apartment waiting. Send it over when your finished.”
Meacham read everything that went in the magazine, of course. Several of my staff were poring over parts of the graphic as we finished them, checking carefully for errors. We were used to all-nighters.
We sent the finished graphic over to Meacham at 7 a.m. My phone rang shortly after.
“It’s fine. Nice job.”
What a guy.
VIDEO WITH ME TALKING ABOUT THE GRAPHIC, LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED
Here is a short Newsweek election promo video that shows me talking about the gatefold (at the 3:00 mark).
Like this:
SXSW Interactive: Why the projected Twitter feed is like a car accident
A sketch I made of what the audience looked like from our perspective: everyone sitting forward, but looking to my upper left at the Twitter feed as we spoke.
It’s disconcerting to speak on a panel to hundreds of people at the South by Southwest conference in Austin and have almost NO ONE looking at or listening to you!. You theatrically pound the table, wave your arms and throw your best intonation at them, but to no avail! And those who are occasionally looking at you are doing so with a clear look of feigned interest, the same sort of dull, sightless look that frequent flyers give to flight attendants as they demonstrate the use the oxygen mask.
So what’s going on here? Why did all these people come to see us just to ignore us? Are we boring them? No, but the audience has been offered a better, more irresistible experience that they can’t ignore. Behind us, on a screen the size of a brownstone, is a visual display of brain candy, some Prezi magic that’s streaming tweets from the audience, a cacophony of highlights, commentary, analysis, jokes and criticism. It was like streaming heroin, and everyone had become addicted and were loath to turn away. They were like rubberneckers driving by a car accident who are praying that they don’t see a dead body (or slamming tweet), while praying that they do. Even EYE wanted to be looking back at the feed instead of listening to us!
Why would they listen to real voices drone on when the really good stuff is being digitally filtered for them. It’s the difference between reading a press release and a news article that puts it all into perspective. We’ve grown up in a sound-bite culture driven by television news shows that do things like condense 45-minute interviews with a U.S. President loaded with content down to, ‘Americans demand jobs!.” (Okay, I concede the sound-bite quote was awesome whenever George Bushisms, like: ”Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”) In a hurried society, sound-bites of information without context are the new norm.
Our audience was divided into two groups.
- One was doing the listening, translating and interpreting what was being said. This takes the skill of a seasoned United Nations translator or a graphics recorder, those people who draw speeches on huge boards in real time, like my friend Sunni Brown (I hope you went to her wonderful SketchCamp yesterday!). You have to somehow listen to what’s being said while, AT THE SAME TIME, translating what has already been said into another language (verbal or visual).
- The rest were mostly ignoring us and reading the Twitter feed.
Our panel was on visual storytelling. C.C. Chapman, Charlie Wollborg, and Becky Johns were the other panelists. (If you’re curious, here‘s my seven minute rant)
Hundreds of people came to hear us. That’s my wife, Dorsey, in green, and Charlie’s wife, Elena, next to her. Even THEY were watching the Twitter feed. Dorsey tried to make me feel better by saying it was a horrible distraction (that I think, like everyone, she loved to read it!)
But you know what, we didn’t mind…
SXSW Interactive: Sticks and brothels
Give a stick a good story and the stick becomes more than a stick, better than the stick it was. (It’s Harry Potter’s lost wand!) Well, that can happen with a bar, and even a conference.
Last night I sat in a dark, tiny, brick room that was exactly the size of a full-size mattress. I know this because just a few short months ago the room had been one of five in the back of a narrow brothel called Midnight Cowboy’s Oriental Massage on Austin’s Sixth active Street and a mattress fit squarely on the floor, stretching wall-to-wall. At six-four-four inches tall, I could not have fit on it without lying at a diagonal. The brothel had been shut down and converted into a very fancy bar that only served about 15 cocktails.
As I sat with five other people crammed along high-backed sofas that ran along two sides the room I couldn’t stop staring at the floor imagining all of the “massaging” that had gone on there for years. I swear I could clearly SEE people down there, as though there were eight (or maybe nine..ten?) of us in the room. It was oddly voyeuristic.
So the bar became more than the bar, better than the bar, because it had a story.
I’m looking for the story behind SXSW that makes it more than just another conference for a specific tribe. As I observed the attendees, and they are fun to observe, it amazed me how so many thousands of people can all look alike, sort of brainy, nerdy, attractive, cool fashionista-type. The “attractive,” “cool,” “fashionista” part is the news item for me. In my high school days these people would have all been members of:
- the short wave and AM/FM ‘radio’ club
- the computer club
- the animation club (I was its only member, and no on knew it existed)
- the chess club
- the AV club
- the honor society
But only the brainy-nerdy description would have applied to these kids; they were certainly not cool and most were certainly not cheerleader and quarterback attractive.
I was a nerd in high school. I was spit on in the showers by the football team (seriously), called fatso by beautiful girls and chased through shopping malls by bullies. I had a very weak support group, whereas I felt these evil doers were being cheered on by the whole school.
As long as there are meatheads, there will be bullies in school, but thanks to the internet, the nerd club is a strong one, and here at SXSW I’ve found my tribe, because I know their story.
VennStorming: The Good, the Bad and The Ugly of Visual storytelling
During the 30 years I’ve been doing information graphics, I’ve made some good ones and some bad, and I mean really bad ones. I’ve been giving some thought to the process and here’s what I’ve come up with. What do you think?
Like this:
Painting: With age comes impatience, and better painting
Loose painting I made this weekend. (click to enlarge)
When I was younger —about 30 YEARS younger— I believed that to be a bona fide and respected painter I had to reproduce the subject of my painting perfectly, with ultimate realism, and I worked hard to achieve that. I was (and still am) a huge Renaissance fan and wanted to be a modern-day Leonard or Michaelangelo and equal their mastery of all things sfumato. A painting could take days, weeks, even a year or two. I say years because painting this way for an impatient A.D.D. person like me was tedious and boring. I would cling to tiny successes, like completing the perfect apple or cloud, often just a fraction of the overall effort that would be needed to complete such a painting with the teeny brushes that such detail demands.
Then, for a long time I decided that I hated painting. It was no fun. I liked the results, but not the journey to get there.
Then I started to age …
With age has come greater self-knowledge and acceptance of what I can and can not abide. With maturity I’ve stopped trying to emulate other people in my art. A few short years ago I decided to give painting another shot, to try to find my own voice, which meant embracing my impatience and letting the brush strokes fall where they may. My painting is looser, and somehow, more real, and I like it. A lot.
I’ve learned to impress myself, and though I’m a much tougher critic than a bunch of 500-year-old dead painters, I find the rewards of achieving personal satisfaction about the best motivator for personal growth there is.
"Brass ensemble." One of my earlier tedious, tiny brush paintings.
