The Next Wave of Format

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•Introduction

•The nature of formats

•How new formats come to be

•The state of creative formats on the web today

•The next wave of format

   Formats for coherence

   Formats for diversity

   Formats for navigation

   Formats for flux

   Formats for ubiquity

   Formats for identifying origins

•Conclusion

Formats for coherence:Integrating text, image, sound, and motion.

When Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore published their graphic manifesto in 1968, The Medium is the Massage, it seemed for a while as if all printed literature would follow suit: integrating text and pictures, with both carrying the weight of a common story together.

That didn't happen. Very, very few people have the necessary skills in writing, image-making, and design to bring pictures and words together in a compelling, meaningful way. Graphic designers are trained to think differently from journalists. Recent research in cognitive science suggests that this training is so deeply ingrained in the processes of perception that it actually affects the physical brain, and the ways in which neurons engage to perceive letter forms.(5) When I studied both graphic design and journalism at once (at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1970s), I learned first-hand about the severe disorientation that occurs when you try to master two such different crafts at once.

Nonetheless -- in a spirit of eternal optimism, I guess — I tried again two years ago, when I taught a course called "Meaning and Media" at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. (6) This was a web production course, focused on making a complex issue come to life: in this case, the knotty dilemma over whether to filter and treat New York City's water supply. I thought that by learning to synthesize interviews, scientific information, images and web architecture, we could create a whole that would be more powerful than the sum of it's parts. Everyone had an unexpectantly rough time with this, especially the students with storng backgrounds in graphic design. One of them expressed her frustration this way: "We [designers] are not used to this. We normally have the meaning handed to us and then all we have to do is present it."

Most teams that work on complex mainstream media projects — such as films, magazines, television shows, and books — tend to operate in a highly compartmentalized fashion. At magazines like Time and Newsweek, the tasks of research, writing, editing, photographing, photo editing, copy-checking, managing production, laying out, typesetting, and marketing are all handled by different people, who often know only the minimum about each others’ creative decisions. In a typical mainstream book project, the writer and the designer of the book cover never meet, even though these two are the individuals most responsible for the impact the book makes on readers.

I know of only one medium where skills in writing and graphics are well-integrated: the often-denigrated medium of comics. Even those who specialize in, say, plotting, dialogue, graphic composition or inking and coloring (as they nearly always must in the superhero production shops of Marvel and DC), must learn to think like their cohorts in the other specialities. And as Scott McCloud demonstrated so compellingly in his book Understanding Comics, creative artists in comics are heirs to a rich heritage of formats, genres and conventions for combining text and image together. McCloud calls this the "vocabulary" of comics, and some of it is quite subtle; for example, the established convention that time is passing as the reader’s eye scans from left to right, with particular thresholds of time passage as the eye crosses the gutter (the gap between panels). McCloud himself has refocused his own work onto computer-based media; his most recent book, Reinventing Comics, is about a preview of the new kinds of formats, still being developed and discovered, through which the comic artists of the future will express themselves amidst the new constraints and possibilities of computer media. Instead of the ordinary left-to-right flows of panels, for instance, McCloud has developed a format he calls "trails" — links between panels that are graphically meaningful and may carry the reader in any direction.

Regrettably, however, even on the web, the skills of graphic design and writing are generally kept separate. Writers and artists, who are used to misunderstanding each others' crafts, now have a whole new craft to denigrate misunderstand: the skill of information architecture, or constructing sequences of pages and portals that people can pass through. Web production houses naturally specialize, contracting for teams of writers, designers and information architects, following the old ad agency or magazine model of a creative team.

But on the web, specialization may no longer be an optimal strategy, for several reasons. First, it's easy to copy, plagiarize, and alter text on a digital platform like the Web. The more closely that text, sound, images, animation, and video depend on each other for their meaning, the harder they are to copy and alter, and the more likely a creator's intent is to survive in the malleable digital maelstrom. Second, there isn't time for specialization; writers up against immediate deadlines, armed with digital cameras, will compete by supplying (and thus thinking about) their own images on the spot. Third, the new design skill of information architecture changes the rule of the game — it forces artists and designers to invest more of themselves in understanding the themes and meanings of their content, because their role will expand to include designing indexes, summaries, annotations and navigation formats. Finally, as broadband becomes commonplace, audiences will grow used to having sound, motion, text, image and meaning all together in one package.

Yet cognitive differences will prevent most creative people from being proficient in all of the necessary skills: writing, graphics, programming, animation, music, and information architecture. It will only happen when there is a rich vocabulary of formats to pick up the slack. The designers of presentation software programs like Powerpoint understand this; Powerpoint is popular precisely because it brings together a lot of easy-to-understand formats that shortcut tedious media skills. But Powerpoint is very unsophisticated, compared to the remarkable format-mixing packages that will probably become prevalent on the Web.

5. Florer, F.L. & Hunter, J. (2000) The Changes in Reading Rate thet Result from Letter Spacing are Attributable to the Detection of Word Boundaries, and Not the Visibility of Letters. European Conference on Visual Perception, Groningen,

Holland; Hunter, J. & Florer F.L. (2000). Is the optimal letter-word spacing ration learned? ARVO Annual Meeting, Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

6. For more about this course, see "'The Meaning and Media' Story," by Art Kleiner.

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