Conversation

Maggie

visting SFO

@Mappletons

Dec 14, 2020

1/ Rereading

@maxkriegers

"Chatting with Glue" piece this morning. Still a classic. Wish there were way more visual-spatial essays around the web. I think we get hung up on calling them "comics." Comics are a distinct visual culture people believe requires drawing skills

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Max Krieger ∈ BOS

@maxkriegers

· May 9, 2020

can we augment our online chats with new affordances?

what does a conversational medium that supports *thinking* look like?

Is there a pathway from the linear, one-dimensional, immutable logs we call "online conversation"? I made a comic! a9.io/glue-comic/

2/ "Comics" come with presumptions about how they 'should' be formatted – panels, word bubbles, superhero action shots Scott McCloud made a great case for broadening the medium in 'Understanding Comics'. But still feels trapped in historical legacy and established practices

3/ I've been calling this kind of work "visual essays" instead Varying degrees of weaving spatial meaning and images into written words on the web. Not full-on comics, but better than sad single-image blog posts Whatever works to convince more people to make them works for me

juan jose fernandez ꩜

@imagetextimage

Dec 14, 2020

There's great work done on visual language theory, what I believe to be the umbrella of what you're talking about by

@visual_linguist

'comics as a manifestation of Visual Language, a language that we see in UI, picture books, highway ads, "graphic design" visuallanguagelab.com/vislang.html

Neil Cohn PhD

@visual_linguist

Dec 14, 2020

Yes, my notion of “visual language” originally emerged from recognizing that “comics” and “juxtaposed images” are actually NOT the same thing, which was liberating for using the latter beyond the stereotypes of the former

juan jose fernandez ꩜

@imagetextimage

Dec 14, 2020

A great example of someone speaking in this mode in a way that is satisfyingly fluid through crudeness is the Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo: instagram.com/avocado_ibupro Lots of embedding of other images and text by others with a simple drawing vocabulary.

Replying to

and

I concur - love the research work you do

@visual_linguist

'Visual language' is a great umbrella term. The 'visual essays' idea is definitely a linguistic side-step. Essentially comics without saying 'comics' 🙊😅

11:27 PM · Dec 14, 2020Twitter Web App

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"Visual language" is the structure of the drawings, in combination with the text. In an old essay I argued we don't need new synonyms for comics, but an adjective that can apply to visual/multimodal objects: graphic essays graphic non-fiction graphic poetry graphic textbooks ...