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Me262 - Nov/Dec 2010

 

The recent article for WWII Magazine is about the Me262.

It was a war changing weapon, had it, like other German 'super-weapons', been delivered in working order and on time. Typically for the Germans, it depended on rare materials and fine engineering that just wasn't available at the necessary scale after 1942.

The post will gloss over some aspects of design and editorial. (but you will know that I'm a bit busy with stuff incl The Design of Understanding)

Cutaways - This one features Selective Detail. I have often resisted doing hyper detailed cutaways, but as this is about certain parts of the plane, and so those parts need articulating.

Colour - I was also quite into the use of colour labelling - and how the Blue of the engines was carried through the whole graphic to give structural consistency to all mentions of engines.

I may add some more comments as the end product was different from the initial ideas. Thanks again to the magazine editorial team for their work and input.

 

Real Life Cutaway (ii) London Taxi

I saw this taxi the other day, with its panneling off. It allowed a view into the parts we never see. (like this fire-engine)

I think that cutaways are popular because they show people something new, starting with something they know.

This is a nice summary of my main drive over this last while

"show somebody something new, starting with something they know"

Make it accessible then make it interesting - in that order.

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.

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.

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.