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US Aircraft Carriers, WWII Magazine, Mar-Apr 2009

 
 

This month's graphic for WWII magazine is about US aircraft carriers. Some say the US fought a naval war, one of large naval battles and amphibious landings (including many in Europe).

Drawing the carrier happened after assembling iPhone pics from a book   

I knew that somewhere would be a diagram of the carrier. I knew I had to do a general tour of key areas and ideas rather than 200 specific features. Some of these are fascinating - the 'ready room' for fliers, the split engines to avoid hits, the protective wall around the fuel tanks. Invariably in such a massive system there is a temptation to get stuck in the detail so I had to zoom out a bit to find the actual story.

This was settled on as concentrating on the Essex class carrier and it's hasty and timely entry into service.

I wanted to show the effect the Essex had on the Pacific carrier war by graphing the following variables:

- Post December 1941 - time

- US and Japanese carriers commissioned, sunk, damaged, repaired, capacity of carriers

So that you can see at any one time how many carriers and ultimately planes, the opposing forces could send at each other. This was something I wanted the piece to stress - that naval power was now about mobility of aerial force, not firepower and armour.

The sketch of the wave concept 

The first graph was about aerial force but in a different way - I sought to show the changing balance of planes - from anti-ship torpedo and dive bombers in the early days when the main objective was destroying other ships - to fighter planes, whose main job was to defend against the kamikazes in the final months.

Here is where I got temporarily distracted by a motif. (I sure I am not the first designer to think I have had a moment of conceptual brilliance, only ditch it after a lot of self-discipline and asking the honest opinions of others.)

I really liked the concept of this fighter make up shown as a wave.

It fitted the nautical theme. It symbolised the crushing might of US industrial output. Best of all it referenced the Japanese artist Hokusai whose Great Wave off Kanagawa is a well-known piece. 

 

It also went with the headline "Launching a steel tsunami" which I was pleased with. (Alliterative headlines provide a simple warm glow to me)

Thus began an internal dilemma of being happy with the visual motif, yet being uncomfortable with it as a means of carrying information.

Cute but faulted 

It was faulty - the area if the inner curve is way less than the outer, distorting the quantitative impression in favour if the outer. (and rendering this with illustrator offset path created loads of duplicates of the vector and overloaded my mac - so there's a tip!)

More importantly, it didn't contribute to a strong story idea - "balance of plane types changed to echo changing strategy/tactics" is ok - but " the Essex carrier helped win the pacific war" is better - so I ditched the wave and went for the other graph as it told a bigger story better.

I deleted the vertical grid - it made too much noise - although it did help with the positioning when drawing the graph

 This graph worked ok- some issues were-

- Data - lots of contradictory data meant a lot of work between the magazine and I to get it right (thanks Caitlin)

- Overlapping lines - I decided that if there were two lines overlapping, the top one would be the one that was at the most advantage at that time

- Tour points - worth mentioning that doing a graph with tonnes of data isn't good enough - key points need pointing out - in this case, key battles and main themes (lots of data-vis these days just throws data at the wall and asks you to ‘play’ with it, without direction – which is why most people don’t.) Take a Tour.

Out of interest - the featured carrier is the USS Intrepid - which is in New York City - go and see it - I'll return after doing this with new stuff to look at for sure.  

Sea Mines - An Undersea Killer Evolves. WWII Magazine, Feb 2009.

This month's graphic for WWII Magazine is on German sea mines and how the Allies countered them.

This graphic was originally created last year. I reworked it in accordance with my more recent thinking.

The old version shows that I was still in my 'sequential' layout phase - (also see the bocage graphic for an example of this)

Staring top left, one would read this in a traditional manner

Sequential graphics can be read like comics/ books and I like that they are deliberate in their guiding of the information absorption. But - they do presume interest on the reader's part and don't "sell their wares" as best they could. They don't make an offer to a reader, inviting them into the subject.

My current thinking is veering to more traditional graphics - the 'Radial' sort. These are where there is a central object that grabs the attention first and signposts the subject of the piece. Subsequent information is then available, but there is no question of what one should look at first.

I do worry that graphics like this imply that the first thing/ the largest/ most colorful/ prominent thing you see is the most important.

I like the interesting details around the objects - their development, use and history - and the object rendered large for signposting purposes seems to distract from that. I am sure I am being too sensitive there. The magazine folks are always keen to make more of the central object - and I am happy to go with this - it seems there is a lot to investigate in that method.

( I must give credit to Peter Schumacher from the University of Trier who once did a fine talk at the SND-E Malofiej conference about how we read graphics - the Radial and Sequential ideas featured in that talk.)

Below is some of the development work. I know that I should have sketched it out first but sometimes I just want to get stuck in.

I thought it might be fun to move into a more abstract/ diagrammatic style - but it wasn't suitable for this , it is not really authentic for me to be finding a 'style' as such at this moment - their may be a consistency of approach - but that is different.

I thought to unite the page and lead the eye by use of this 'river. It is conceptually sound/ connected to the subject but too dominating of the layout.

Just having a simple single background would lead the eye, but it implied a steady development of one variable - whereas this graphic was about different kinds of mines.

More single-background element here - but too distracting from the foreground elements - and a bit overboard with the 3-d water effect etc.

I eventually went for blocks to show each type of mine - and I used old fashioned perspective guidelines to draw them.

The next few graphics I do for the magazine are going to explore the basics of the 'central object' more. After doing this for a while, I realize that there are some basics I still need to master - drawing, basic composition, labeling, type hierarchy etc. (and even though these graphics are pretty good - they have a way to go before they are faultless). When that happens, then I can get cleverer. (The adage that the more you know, the more you know you don't know is true here.)

It feels like walking before running which must be a good thing.

Radar Rules the Waves - WWII Magazine, December 2007

This month's article is concerned with The Battle of the Atlantic.

Editorial Ideas
This is a big subject and initially I wanted to put alot more in the graphic.

I eventually decided to just concentrate on the Sonar and Radar war. There was also an idea to do a graphic (that will feature in the book proposal) on what I am calling 'The Radar Race', but the editor decided that that subject was pretty well covered and we should go for a lesser known aspect of the struggle for intelligence.

In concentrating on one aspect of The Battle of the Atlantic, I had a good opportunity to investigate others for a later date.

These include-

• Further exploration of the Leigh Light and it's use
• The Radar Race in the Air
• U-Boat attack tactics
• The Schnorkel U-Boat - German technology to enable longer diving times was late in delivery
• Torpedo technology
• The Air Gap and Anti-Submarine planes - especially the long range of the B-24 and how it helped to close the 'Air Gap'.

Design Factors
Timeline
This timeline is slimmed down and ultimately better for it.

It did include ranges of the radar too. It was difficult because some of them had a small - 20 mile  - range and some had a massive range - 300 miles. This would have made the scale too large and meaningful comparison would have been difficult.

I wanted to see if I could show the difference between airborne and shipborne too as regards range but again, doing the basics of presenting facts by date - and the amount of apace available - negated the ability to lay out the data in that way.

The timeline was initially just vertical solid lines, but the left-to-right fade gives it some movement and alludes to the subject without detrating from the data. There would probably not be any need to 'affect' left to right movement on a larger and more spacious timeline, where the eye builds up it's own head of steam across the page, but this one was small and fairly cramped and I wonder that the 'go faster' lines help it acheive a more 'kinetic' (albeit a little forced) quality.

'Kinetic composition'
I should credit this phrase to Chris Pullman of WGBH in the US. I am fortunate enough to know Chris through my fiancée and he gave me some good advice when I last saw him. He was looking at the Bazooka graphic (I always carry a small folio of work in progress around at conferences in case I bump into wise people) and he mentioned how I should seek to improve the 'kinetic' quality of the composition.

At that time, the sense of movement in the graphic - both to lead the eye - and for a degree of excitement - wasn't so pronounced and his use of that word pretty much told me what I should do. It's inspiring when someone speaks in words of instant affordance. Thanks Chris.