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Nightfighters - WWII Magazine, May 2010

 

This month's graphic for WWII Magazine is about German Nightfighters and the tactics they used against the RAF strategic bombing campaign.

I haven't had too much time to compose one of my longer posts on this one but here are some points raised.

Model Specifics - Isolating which weapons configurations were used on one of these planes was extra hard this time. The Me110 had a long service and saw much modification. In addition to this was the fact that many nightfighters were experienced pilots who would insist on custom armament. So - if you see other Me110s with differing weapons systems by all means leave a comment but bear the above in mind.

Printing On Black - The magazine tend to do a great job of reproducing what I see on screen to their pages - so well done the tech teams - but I wonder if I'm not making their jobs a bit harder with doing graphics on black backgrounds. I also know that white type out of black is harder to read so any one with any answers to that let me know - no dogma please.

New collaborator - The magazine has a new art director - Rudy Hoglund. My (long distance with the folks in Virginia means us understanding each other from afar is really important -  but things seem vcool so far.

Airplane Cutaways

 

I found this Italian site with tonnes of cutaways the other day. 

Cutaways seem a popular search term.

There are other cutaways (tanks, submarines) but it is mostly planes.

Back to work.

Spitfire fighter plane. WWII Magazine, Nov issue, 2009

This month's WWII Magazine graphic looks at the Spitfire fighter plane. 

The story is that despite improvements to the Battle-of-Britain-winning-plane, the thin wings that enabled its superiority also prevented it from carrying much fuel - rendering it less useful for the longer range missions as the Allies progressed into Europe.

Below are some issues that arose during its creation.

Parti

I am developing some ideas based on the architectural principle of 'parti'. 

This is the 'unifying principle' of the building. 

In graphics I see it as the unique compositional distinction - the basic idea of the graphic - as manifest in the underlying composition. 

It goes beyond the satisfying swoosh of a knapkin sketch. It is similar to affordance in interaction design - an immediate clue as to the workings of an object - although as well as this functional cue, the parti in information graphics informs the reader of the purpose and basic thrust of the facts.

It can be as simple as in a graphic about recession, a sense of 'downwards' should prevail. 

The spitfire graphic is about improvement - that is why the plane on the right is soaring up - and the shape of the whole is progressive. 

Ill be writing more about this. 

I first read it in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School -  quite a nice primer on such matters - and gold dust for me in the parti bit. 

It doesn't seem to be mentioned in other architecture books much - apart from knapkin sketches from long lunches. Matt J was a good sounding board on this - and also told me I needed a propeller ellipse (I was sticking to my guns that the prop would be invisible - but was consistently shouted down by him and others)

The See-Through-Plane

The central images are the cutaway Spitfires. 

They are not traditional cutaways - with their mechanical guts exposed in glistening detail. I have selected a few items to highlight as I wanted to show the pilot in the machine above all else.

Close-up of the pilot

I started off wanting to compare the guns, engines, other important variables in the planes but at this scale, they look fairly similar and so there was little point. 

I was very keen to show the pilot's place in the plane  - in order to show the vulnerability of those flying these machines.

These fighters were just engines with wings and guns with pilots were slotted in behind the fuel tanks.

I wanted this to show the pilots as supported aloft by these machines with not much between them and the elements.

(I was also inspired by a bit in the Freak Brothers underground comics where an accomplice of the protagonists hallucinates that he is flying in a sky filled with see-through-planes flown by naked women. 

Not many military technology information graphics blogs can say that.)

WWII Fighter Plane Silhouettes (1)

A chat with Toby Barnes today had us discussing the difficulty in finding decent silhouettes for WWII fighter planes.

I have had a lot of google searches come to this site too - searching for WWII Fighter Plane Silhouettes.

So I thought i would share what sources I have seen.

I would stress that the best ones are often to be found in books - although some on the web are decent for cross-checking. 

One always needs to be careful about provenance and accuracy with these - there is alot of variation in models - early Mustangs different from later ones etc.

The below site is very sound.(but the use of frames in the web design means that you need to look for the 'Plans 3-vues' on the side - never mind - it is worth it)

http://richard.ferriere.free.fr/

Plenty of 'secret Luftwaffe' projects here

http://www.luft46.com/

focke wulf profiles

http://fw190.hobbyvista.com/profiles.htm

spitfire profiles

http://www.spitfiresite.com/reference/camouflage-markings/default.asp

here are some nice cutaways if that is what you like

http://www.flightglobal.com/staticpages/cutaways.html

and if you are into more of the german plane schematics, this is an interesting book

So - that is pretty much what i have in my links list for silhouettes.

This wasn't really a post about any information design insight or such but some of the draughtsmanship above is pretty fabulous. 

Leave any that I missed in the comments if you like.

The Waco Glider - WWII Magazine, July 2009

This month's article is about US 'Waco' Gliders and the risks they posed to those inside them.

Lessons Learned

I wanted to fully address the issue of signposting in my information graphics. 

It's a bit of a watershed. The current editor and I had a chat about these when I started and he felt they needed more signposting. I took a while to agree because I was so keen to get to the data, to get to the complexity and main thrust of my argument.

I forgot the Mario Garcia principle of News design - "design for both scanners and readers".

The signpost lets the casual reader know instantly what they are about to experience. (there is a massive glider in the main part of the left page - so this is about gliders and air war.)

Before the eye hits the glider, do you show the map at the top too? was one of my quandries - I thought it introduced things pretty well - and maps in News Design always give a veracity and underline a time and place

I didn't think the map deserved a large piece of the right page

 

This has been an issue with some of the last few years articles. Some have been so concerned with their stories as to forget to remind the casual reader what they are actually about. 

I think that in future, the signpost can be more subtle, but swinging too far from your habits is a way of learning too - as long as you swing back abit.

Drawing the Glider

I set up a separate document so as to concentrate solely on the Glider art. I used guidelines on other layers to aid the construction.

So if I was going to draw a glider, I thought I'd better do it right - or good enough at least. I have been looking at technical drawing methods and gradually putting some into practice.

I amassed plenty of photo reference, found a decent photo to trace for the outline and went about filling in the detail from the photos. It was all done on the mac - using a Wacom tablet.

The blue guides were for the struts within the glider - a series of metal tubes that would need to interlink under the glider skin.

Only a couple of line thicknesses were used - and tapers were used by converting the line to paths then tweaking the points.

The thicker outside line helps define the object but one needs to be careful not to make it too thick - as many do who try to make their diagrams that extra bit more authentic.

Invasion stripes were added for both accuracy and also for form definition - always nice if surface elements can help define the character of the object too - not just provide detail or colour

Drawing the Comparison Gliders

The comparison Gliders are smaller and only need to show their basic forms. A little bit like Aircraft Identification silhouettes - all the reader needs to know is their basic shape, to reflect on major design differences - wing placement, width of fuselage or comparable size. No other detail is needed in the illustration because no other detail is in the story. These are realistic representations but they are heavily edited to their basic essences.

The smaller glider shapes were exercises in economy - an outer line and just enough detail to define and differentiate in the actual form

Drawing the Landing Zone

I thought that to illustrate the landing zone I would need to create a generic landing zone.

Too realistic a render would have made The landing zone - I just wanted A landing zone. So the main thing with that is to make the pictures more like symbols - they stand for the elements - not unlike the smaller Gliders above. 

But this illustration style and aspect is too unreal, demanding and thus attention sapping - the minute people are uneasy or thinking why is that like that then you have lost them

The roughly sketched approach seemed to be precise/ vague enough - it was mainly a question of the contrast with other elements - both internal 0 the darks and lights - and the external - the contrast with the other elements on the page - so i lightened it so as not to cause an imbalance

This was the simple light and dark lines - quite nice but a bit too contrived - too vague - not precise enough

People

Starting with the last few graphics I want to feature people in these pictures. A friend of mine mentioned that it is strange that these graphics are all about technologies designed and affecting man but feature no one. 

So I continued the direction of the last graphic - looking for a style of render of people that speaks to their humanity, is not too precise and marks them out as different in kind from the technology that they are involved with - possibly more obviously organic lines making up these souls at the mercy of the harder straighter lines around them.

Next Issue...

I am really into the direction we are going with these. I am happy to work with a team that is happy to see progress and I hope they see the fruits of their constructive and civil critique in every article.

The next few are going to be good.

The Norden Bombsight and US Precision Bombing - WWII Magazine Dec 2008

This graphic for WW2 Magazine looked at the US Norden Bombsight – it’s operation and effectiveness.

Designing for the spread

The first iterations looked too much like unrelated pages.

An ongoing issue is designing for the double spread. I'm aware that people will need to orientate themselves in the Whole to begin with - and then look at the Parts in a measured, instructional way if they are interested. They will scan the graphic looking to see how it is to be read and then they will start.

The overall structure of the spread should also make clear what to look at first. This was a bit of an issue with the circular bomb data – it’s place on the right of the composition seems to say ‘read this second’ but it’s shape and compositional strength provide a pull that is arguably stronger that that of the elements on the left of the page. 

I am working on a sketching/prototyping style to discuss early ideas around - not too specific - not too vague.

Bill (editor) suggested a good fix of the blue background behind the left page - this united the two pages. It turns out that this is a rule of diagramming - a tinted background brings out the illustration more too. It means that this is more a linked spread rather than two separate pages - but linked by nuanced background colour rather than strength of composition?

How do you introduce a series of steps that pave the way for the grander conclusion without people rushing to that conclusion? 

This is a big issue for me as many of these graphics are about the development of the technology as a solution to a need. Ideally I want people to read the introductory context before the analysis of the object/ solution - but if the solution is the focus (larger, noticeable element), they may look there first.

That is why some of the first graphics were many joined, small elements - more like a comic - readable panel by panel. I still think there is mileage in that sequential approach - but it does presuppose that all readers are in it for the long haul rather than flipping through the magazine, choosing what to read based on the overview we give them at the 'start' of the graphic.

Colour mapping

The main challenge of the left side was to link the three related groups of information:

1) the Bombsight and its key parts

2) the principles of Bombing

3) the operations of bombardier and bombsight

I first considered spatial mapping to match these elements - this was tricky as the bombsight has a lot of its manual inputs on the right and so there wasn't an obvious mapping. This was despite the operations and principles matching quite nicely across the page. 

(this is one of the reasons that Minard's Napoleon graphic is so good - it is very fortunate in how the variables of data map to each other - e.g. the march was east - the same way we read time - left to right etc - more on that another day)

I decided to do this using colour – to match the three factors of Parts, Principles and Operation. 

Colour is excellent at categorising scattered variables that have something in common, but not compositional proximity. This way I could infer linkages between the three above factors without them lining up nicely on the page.

Caitlin and the magazine staff were really valuable here – especially in the wrangling of the 'Operation' details. The sketches below show my working out in reducing and reorganising the data while hopefully keeping the (heavily edited and relevant) facts in there.

It took a while to edit each of these categories so that they were not too simplistic.

It was tricky to get the Operation text (colored - at the bottom) to spatially map with the process diagrams - middle - see how the colours nearly line up - but not quite  - and not at all with the Parts Diagram at the top.

This one boiled down the Operation text (bottom) as little too far  - but I liked how it read across the page.

This way gave me more room for Operation text - but relegated the Sight diagram and segregated the two pages too much.

Drawing Style

The render of the bombsight shows some progress in the my draughtsmanship of these Weapons Manual pieces. 

A month or two ago, a friend and I were considering working on a  comic together and we both had some beers to chat about plots, characters etc – we even met up to do some drawing to test the waters.

I decided that my WW2 Magazine commitments were enough to be getting on with but in exploring some character sketches, I looked further at a Black Line and Fill render that I was happy with. (that is the style of comic illustration I most like – with Brian Bolland is an obvious hero here:

 – buy his book for Christmas if you are needing any present-inspiration for the comics fan in your life).

Although Geoff Darrow, Hergé and Frank Quitely are fantastic too.

Anyway . . . (and I am by No means about to compare myself with them -haha)

It was during this sketching that I thought that the style of line drawing was pretty suitable to certain parts of my graphics work – the thicker defining edges and thinner inside lines etc. 

Done using a mixture of Illustrator straight line and variable-pressure-brush-tool with a Wacom tablet and pen

I want to explore this further and am collecting examples of line work (mail me if you have any).

Icons

Am I right to use these realistic icons? They are certainly accurate – these are the B17-G planes, used at this time later in the war. But do they convey ‘bomberness’ as much as they might?

 To B-17G or not to B-17G?

The question needs to be are they good enough to communicate the idea of ‘Plane Dropping Bombs’ and I think they are  - luckily the B-17G has a very pronounced tail that survives this reduction in size -  whilst maintaining their role as readable symbols.

But - I think some of the readership will appreciate these details. I bet a few notice and are glad that I have taken care - or they may just be sticklers for detail.

The Data

I am happy with this arrangement on the right page but it was not without it's issues.

'Bubble charts' (area-defining circles instead of bars) are much the vogue but I think mine are justified here

I am happy that it is efficient in using the basic pie-chart device for multiple layers of data.

It defines the proportion of a whole bombs dropped nicely -  with the pie chart.

It uses the overlaid radial scale to show tonnage in each mile segment. 

It uses increasingly opaque-cloud pie-sections to actually obscure the map below – conceptually sound - to show proportions of bad weather.

I had to combine the amounts that fell within a mile (three different amount: 1 mile, .5 miles, 300 yards) as it wouldn’t be possible to show them on this diagram - as the amount of space in the middle for all those variables inside one mile is very small. There is always a tension between the suitability of the display construct/metaphor and the portrayal of data and this time the metaphor won out. Some would argue that the display construct should be the servant of the data. I think that the main idea of this graphic sis to show the inaccuracy of bombing in the outer ranges - rather than the accuracy of the areas close to the target so in that way I am OK with leaving out the data from the very middle.

I would have rather showed this detail but I don't think it obscures or distorts the basic story. It is just another case of design/ communication being about what you leave out. (Galling when you have been in the Imperial War Museum writing it all down on tracing paper - but hey.)

Easter Eggs in Graphics

Easter eggs are hidden messages or items in media/computer games/software (anywhere).

When dealing with a specialist magazine,(as well as providing the normal levels of data – both simple and complex) one should provide a level hidden to 99% of people apart from the experts. 

They are the people who will be more likely to spend time poring over these graphics and so to reward their attention it might be nice to make sure that there are some surprises.

In this graphic, those who know about the USAAF Bomber War will know that Regensburg was a significant target throughout the war, so they might notice that the map underneath the data is one of those much-bombed rail yards, rather than something non-specific - and this map is not published anywhere else. I found it in the USBSS (United States Strategic Bombing Survey). 

I think people who know about stuff like such knowing references. I would just need to make sure that it didn’t steer attention from the main thrust of the data/ story.

I’ll try to include these deep lying surprises in future ones too.

Thanks Alice

My sister is a cartographer and she gave me some excellent advice on this. She mentioned that the weather labels needed to be always the same way up as readers didn’t like moving the publication around in order to read it (obvious now I think about it). She also helped get the labeling sorted. ----- So thanks Alice x.

Labeling

We had to work hard on the labeling and location of the labeling – I was worried that it needed to work too hard and that the graphic should be more self explanatory. 

I think that labels and sign posting are generally welcomed by the readers. This graphic saw us play a little more with Wendy's design style guide - testing out what some of the smaller fonts and different sub-heads could do. 

I think they can really help future graphics in their readability - but much of the way to a readable graphic is having one that sticks to a central theme across one spread - and that is what we will be doing more of in the coming year.

WWII Fighter Plane Armament

This month's graphic compares different armaments from fighters in the WWII European Air War. 

The aircraft are armed according to purposes that changed throughout the war e.g. we can see that German fighters at the end of the war were armed with heavier calibre weapons so the could shoot down the bombers over their homeland.(And the US fighters that defended these bombers only needed a lighter calibre MG round for their primary task - destroying fighters.)

Editorial Issues

There were many factors to a plane's lethality - not least the experience of the pilots - this a factor that did for the Luftwaffe in 1944 as the Allies began to destroy oil and planes used for training. But I was going to concentrate on the calibres of weapons that differed in the air powers.

Point of View

I wanted to give an idea of how much armament each plane carried.

Some books show the weight of rounds fired through the air. 

One could also argue that the cannon shells had explosive filling and so their effectiveness wasn't just down to mass or velocity. 

Others discuss the benefits of lighter MG rounds that can travel further at a higher rate and so can lay more fire on a target, against the slower but heavier cannon rounds that fell shorter and at a lower rate of fire.

I just decided that in the interests of an understandable graphic, the calibre size and number of guns would be highlighted, with the text explaining the issues around these choices.

Design Issues

From the start I wanted to show life-size calibres of these weapons.

Ideally we would have had them punching holes through the paper, but this would prove too costly. 

 

We worked out that the pages on the other side - that you looked through to - would need to be heavily text based so that the holes would show a (ground )texture very different to the 'figure' of the page.

The idea for life-sized holes came to me earlier on in the graphic that compared key WWII tanks.

I tried quite a few experiments with showing life sized calibres 

there but the circles had too much overlap 

and the information was hard to read. It also lost the punchiness of being a darker hole in the paper and became (aesthetically pleasing - 

but not very useful) blobs.

So with the calibre graphic, i started out showing the holes separately, easily labelled and comparable - showing how many weapons each plane had of which calibre. I laid them out along a horizontal axis that shows the war years - a decent canvas for comparing technologies.

I then colour coded them 

And then wanted to add more data and this required that i overlaid the calibre-holes where possible - 

 

and then in order to add a signpost to the graphic - to show at a glance what it was about, I added plane silhouettes. The earlier tank graphic could have done with these just to let people know what they were getting - without proving too much of a distraction

I was quite happy with this - but the editorial team at the magazine felt that some of the calibres were getting hard to read - they had a good point. We also wanted to try the real-holes-in-the-paper so we came up with this arrangement.

There is the added benefit in that there is now the space to include other data abut these planes, including range and speed. It was a nice way to prototype using a mixture of scanned pencil sketch and some elements in Adobe Illustrator just to point out how some of the elements would look.

The use of these icons to show the common targets was also carefully considered. I was lucky enough to discuss in a day long tutorial by Scott McCloud that an harmonising elements (eg colour or background shapes) should not take anything from the recognition/ reading of the actual shapes/ symbols. I figured that the ones in circles looked like the real thing but didn't read as well - so out they came.

Cutaways in Information Graphics

I have been wanting to talk about cutaways for a while and there is so much to them that this will just be getting some thoughts in order - one of many posts on general Information Graphics issues.

I was walking to work this morning and I walked past a Fire Station, where one of the engines was out the front with all it's side panels up. 

I could see all the stuff inside and I went round the other side and a confused fireman said I could take a picture.

It's a real life diagram of where everything is kept. 

There are no lines, or 3D or clever pencilling - this is what it is. In many graphics there is alot of stuff that we seem to put in the way pf explainations when a simple photo will do. 

I'm not going to go to the effort of labeling it all but you could see where this could have gone.

And it is also important to not have it floating in white space, but subtley edited, still in context, yet highlighted. 

Anyway.

When I got to work I had a look at a soon to be published book of Eagle Comic Cutaways that we had been sent.

They hold a lot of charm in their nostalgic qualities, possibly the visual equivalent of childhood smells, yet -  (sorry to ruin the magic here John - I know you're a fan) - they slightly miss the point when it comes to explaining things. 

By putting all their eggs in the Cutaway basket, they miss out on the purposes and invention of the tech that they celebrate. The one above does feature a little of extra info - but there is little doubt what the main event is.

A cutaway is a basic graphic - the state of things made clear, like a graph with one variable of data, rather than seeking to draw comparison, reasoning, correlation or causation. The danger is that they celebrate the basic rendering rather than information imparting. They are doubtlessly beautiful but I wonder to what end.

Weirdly enough, here is a fire engine (there wasnt one in the book) by the most famous artist of eagle cutaways Leslie Ashwell Wood. (for sale if you want)

He also did some very interesting WWII illustrations - here on the UK national Archives site. You can zoom in and see the paint/ gouache/ white-out. V.cool.

They are fantastic. So maybe I have been a bit hard on them. 

I'll leave the final word to a pal, Jack Schulze, who bought me in to talk graphics with his students at the Central a few years ago.

I showed them this NYT graphic for the Gulf War II - they apparently bought up a load of technical illustrators in the US for this period.(NYT fans should check Shan Carter's site too)

 It is an Apache Gunship and in the paper you can see every nut and bolt.

Jack said "What am I going to do? Build one?"

I like that comment - on the one hand it shows the futility of showing that amount of detail to the average reader - yet it belies the reasons that people (especially tech minded ones) like cutaways - because they are not reading about where an engine is on a rocket ship - they are dreaming about building one. 

Kamikaze Deconstructed - WWII Magazine April/May 2008

This graphic for WWII Magazine is concerned with the Kamikaze tactics employed by Japan during WWII.

Editorial Issues
Data Integrity
The graphic element at the bottom of the left hand page shows numbers of kamikazes. Due to the lack of proper records and confusion of these attacks, precise numbers are harder to come by but I think that the graphic here represents a s fair proportion of sunk ships to overall missions. One insight from doing this piece of work was that the deck-gunners and sailors on the US ships couldn't be 100% positive as to which was and wasn't a Kamikaze plane when they were at distance - as the escort planes would fly close to them and also act as unwitting decoys.

Selection of Planes
I wasn't exhaustive with the selection of all planes used in these missions for the same reasons of space and the fact that in their desperation , the Japanese used many many types of plane for this task. I mentioned others apart fro he Zero because it is important to challenge people's mental model of WWII - beyond that which they get from the mass media.

Demystification
I felt it important to point out the fallibility of much of the technology and tactics and to show that es, they did create chaos and death but ultimately they lost more than they gained.
I think this is one of the most important aspects of this work - especially as there is so much rubbish written about the superiority of Axis technology and troops. Yes - each side's military had it's strengths and weaknesses, but it is important to explain that this tactic was used because they were desperate - id they had plenty f planes, plenty of pilots and plenty of oil, they would have carried on with a more conventional form of defence I am sure (albeit more desperate the closer the lies got o the home islands. (Any non-S readers should check out The War - a documentary which is unashamedly US in it's outlook - although fair in it's assessment of the sacrifice of others (including the USSR). But even though we see various Hollywood films, the US story is not told in depth to the non-US citizen - so the War is a good place to start.

Design Issues
Themed Pages
In the work I am doing for the magazine and the book proposal, I am trying to introduce visual coding of the subject matter that should run throughout. It is done here with The use of the blue background - something I am trying to use for many of the aerial graphics - especial when the detail is concerned with the tactics of flying rather than just machinery. I will also continue the colour coding of the different belligerent powers - Green for USA, Khaki for UK, Red for USSR and Blue/ Grey for Nazi Germany. It is hard to evaluate whether it will work or whether it is worth doing until a larger body of work is built up and the graphics can be read as a series or at least related - no just by the subject material but by the basic building blocks that make them. It is odd to develop a style guide on the fly - as opposed to running into what many designers love doing - great big style guide 'bibles' - but I wonder that I don't have the full range of all the required variable s of such a guide in front of me yet - so I'm doing it as I go along.

Oversimplification
I felt that the crash tactics were pretty well explained with the three stage sequence on the right hand page but one issue was with what kind of treatment to show the impact. This is one of the few graphics (even though they all deal with parts of a catastrophic story) that shows mortal moments and I hope that they are shown sensitively.

Some (experts) could also argue that the proximity fuse is too simple - that it takes a lot of the operations of such a device for granted. I think that one needs to remember that the editorial gravity of the graphic is about kamikazes and so just as the Leigh Light deserves it's own spread from the Radar graphic - a call needs to made i the story telling and the call was that the Proximity fuse needed to explained simply.