Visual Media Storytellers

Political correctness finds little love with me, a fact that becomes immediately — and often uncomfortably — evident to anyone who works with me on a project. I prefer to present the world as I see it, idiosyncrasies and all, and let what I see as truth speak for itself. Honest, open design speaks louder than any self-conscious, fearful design ever could, and I am known for nothing if not being outspoken, occasionally to my own detriment.

To wit, when designing a new site for the School of Journalism at UT Austin, I incorporated the infamous image of OJ Simpson at his trial with his hand in an ill-fitting glove. I saw no harm in the image, but immediately after we went live, our office received a handful emails about the image’s “potential offensiveness to the black community”. I dismissed the criticism out of hand, since I, as a black designer myself, didn’t find the image in any way derogatory or even provocative.

Nevertheless, our office opted to launch an extensive redesign investigation under the euphemism of “user-testing” to determine whether by-and-large the site was tasteful and inoffensive.

One subject of the user testing, a black woman, was specifically asked 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.”

She was right, of course, but 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 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 death is quite significant not because a celebrity was accused of her murder but 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 insignificant, but the stories we wove around that common event, with the vast help of the diligent media, aren’t.

The media takes events, both significant and not, 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 irrelevant 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 so impacted us as a society 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. They become memes that are passed from person to person, from generation to generation, etching themselves upon our shared, cultural memory. These stories are what create our collective history. More than a collection of supreme court cases and presidential tenures taught in high school US history classes, history is shaped by the everyday lives of everyday people, and that includes the advertisements they published and read, the packaging they illustrated, the book jackets they designed and enjoyed. We weave these visual building blocks positioned securely at the cornerstones of our culture into an overarching story that penetrates each individual on many levels. 

We designers may not think of ourselves as storytellers, but we are. Every item we create, every problem we solve, every visual artifact that we leave behind is imprinted upon human memory. We, like so many artists and writers that have gone before us, are powerful people. Each one of us who turns an item or image into a symbol and sets that symbol before our collective eyes tells a story, and that story becomes history, mythology. And because of this, we need to think very carefully about the stories our work is telling. 

In the movie Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter tells Agent Starling that “we covet what we see every day.” Every fledgling advertiser knows this. Ad designers inundate us with larger-than-life images, and before long we find ourselves lusting after myriad items we don’t need and that won’t make our lives better. 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.

Because of our immense power to influence, designers have an obligation to the cultures we serve and create. The symbols that we portray are affected not only by the connotations the viewer already has 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 unglamorous imagery are sensationalism and romanticism. Nobody is served by presenting the unseen in alluring, unrealistic ways. Even positive stereotypes can be damaging, for stereotypes are necessarily flat — they lack substance, heart, reality. Robbing a subject of the flaws and foibles that root it in the real world isn’t our goal as designers. The goal is to uncover these images and symbols 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. And on the occasion where we are asked to look at something ugly, it is often presented in a diffused, romanticized light. Some things are simply ugly, but their ugliness does not negate their value. There is a real danger in the designer’s or 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 every day, and those of us in the business of designing and determining what our culture sees every day are in a commanding position. But how many of us are rising to the challenge? How many of us are using our skills and positions to contest how things are, and encourage what could be? Are enough designers fighting the good ethical fight to sway our culture toward a larger vision of beauty, or even better, toward unveiling what is real and significant, beautiful or not?

Intuitively, people know what is important. We, like the reviewer at the beginning of this paper, can recognize sensationalism for what it is. How much more would we benefit as a culture if we filled our eyes with reality — with our neighbors, our pastimes, our quotidian trials? How much more connected would we feel if we saw ourselves and our lives reflected in beautifully laid out magazine spreads? In the movie Thirteen Going on Thirty, the film’s heroine, a fashion magazine editor, unveils a storyboard for her proposed redesign of the failing magazine. But to underscore how far fashion has fallen from reality, she displays images all too familiar to anyone who has seen a magazine ad — airbrushed, anorexic models with large eyes and sunken cheeks dressed in clothing no real human could ever wear posed in some improbable situation with eyes partially closed, lips pouty or otherwise slightly parted. And she asks the company’s creative team, “Who are these women? Does anyone know? I don’t recognize any of them.”

The images that we are accustomed to seeing in posh ads and on glossy pages aren’t the people we know and love. As the movie’s protagonist goes on to explain that she wants to see her “best friend’s big sister…and the girls from the soccer team. [Her] next-door neighbor” in the pages of a magazine, we are left to think about the images that we see every day, and how far removed from life those images truly are.

What do we see every day? And how is it presented? How can we do better, bringing richness and authenticity to our work and to our cultures? How can we add meaning to our lives by infusing our visual, cultural stories with big sisters, school principals, and next-door neighbors? The way forward is clear — we have only to be daring enough to begin the journey. It isn’t too late for us to reclaim visual storytelling’s place in reality, to begin leaving a better, more interesting visual history for the generations to come.