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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 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.

 

M18 Tank Destroyer, WWII Magazine, August 2010

 

August's graphic is about the US tank destroyers. These armoured vehicles were initially out-gunned by the german tanks they were sent to destroy. They were integrated with the infantry and found a better use as a support weapon.

The armored wedge My principal concern here was 'is this shape too dominant on the page?'. 

The technology in focus (in this case the m18 ) is meant to be the image that readers see first - it is often on the left (where oddly in magazine design the eye should read first but may see second due to the turn of the page - or maybe people are obedient readers and don't sneak a look at the right page - but i doubt it.) 

Anyway, I was worried that the 'armour wedge' not only attracted too much attention but created a compositional discord on the spread - effectively dividing a double page spread into two. Many print editorial designers say you need to fill the whole spread - I am in two minds on this.

In one way the story I tell every time is of a technology, with key features highlighted and how it fits into a bigger picture - the context of it's use, manufacture or invention. 

It is my singular editorial purpose with the articles to highlight the bigger picture of WWII using the technologies as an accessible starting point. But there have also been times where at the rough stage that the weapon in question and the rest of the story haven't been so well united. This results in everything from reading difficulty (where do I start? What is this about) to general confusion (what is this about ?). It is a frequent discussion point between the excellent editorial teams and I - and I find their second pair of eyes invaluable there. (Contributors/ Creatives, what ever you do - You need a good 'editor') Or maybe I need to get better at uniting the different elements. I hope I am not jamming reluctant actors together in each if these scenes.

Other ideas

I like the idea of real life sizes on the graphic - I wouldn't want to do it every time - but there is something rewarding it the immediacy of this.

A few graphics appear on a 'landscape' vista. Have I been affected by Apple's shiny floored warehouse? Hmm - not sure - seems a nice way to set our certain ideas though.

And on the render - things are looking a little vector-arty - fades, line-art isometry, more fades - i may need to cut down on this. They are entirely appropriate to the needs of the story and data within, but there may be a Tuftian unintended consequence of this render - that of dating the work back a decade and so readers pause briefly to question it's provenance, distracting them from their primary task of understanding. (this may be a small price to pay for work that I believe seeks a timeless quality of integrity to the information and not modern fashion). 

But - these are read on many levels - and the render will give signals - it's up to me to orchestrate those impressions - and one of them is an anonimity - a quality that immediately imparts the information without drawing attention to itself.

Some would say that the render needs to bring the reader in, that impartiality is sterile. I agree that if I am putting off new readers with coldness then that is an issue. I would like to think that the ideas contained within - the data, the story angle will shine through the glass of a sympathetic vessel to communicate and entice, rather than falling back on fashion, which always attracts but seldom informs and never lasts.

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.

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.  

The makeshift MP3008, SMGs, WWII Magazine, Nov 2009

This month's graphic for WWII Magazine looks at the lesser known MP3008. It was a German submachine-gun, drafted into minimal use at the end of the war. It was an insalubrious end for the fine craft heritage of German WWII weaponry - although this attention to technical detail was not tenable.

The graphic started life as a general family tree of many other submachine guns. This type of weapon was invented in WWI, but many variants were used in WWII. I wanted to show the main developments, color coded by country.

As soon as i decided that the MP3008 was th focus I deleted all guns not related. This meant getting rid of the US Finnish and Russian guns - which i am sure i will come back to.

I then thought to add data on the global resources available to build weapons, but it split the page too much.

The magazine editor Bill and his staff felt that the page needed a focus. They felt that a system diagram such as a family tree did not give the reader enough of a starting point.

There was far too much working this out on the page - something I am trying to get away from - that is what sketchbooks are for!

Al these are trying to resolve the need to point at the Main Object - the MP3008 - which is on the left - not the normal place people start to read.

Then, I decided to add detail on the operation of the gun - this added a new variable to the graphic - already tense with competing focal demand - especially the UK and German Timelines, which were not quite working out - until below:

Below is the art file I send to the magazine - it looks a little naked.

This piece had people in it like many of the newer ones. I wanted to show the progression from static warfare to mobile SMG warfare - to the fellow crouched down, waiting for it to stop. I quite like the place-holding sketch - maybe i should have kept it?

 

Drawing the weapons

I started off doing line drawings with a plain white fill.

I then wanted to fill them, bringing them a more informal style, with some fairly broad brush strokes - away from the technical illustration gradients and 3d renders that permeate elsewhere.

Colour coding

I kept some of the principles of the assigned colour following the relevant parts throughout. I also started to use 'bitten' lines - with white either side to direct the label better.

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.)

Flak - WWII Magazine, Sept. 2009

 

This month's article for WWII magazine is all about German anti aircraft defences and the effect they had on US forces.

The data comes from this fantastic source - US Medical Corps.(some images there are a little tough so be careful if you are young or of a squeamish disposition - they are fairly well labeled and hidden behind links) 

US data on WWII is quite easy to find. British data is harder to come by - seems more secretive. Russian stuff is obviously in a state of post-soviet de-classification and most of the German records were destroyed.

Here are some comments about this month's graphic. I'm really happy with it as it brings together some material I have been seeking to wrangle for a while and it achieves it's ends in a way that has been a learning process.

Content

I have been poring over these data tables for a while, trying to work out what was the best way of telling these stories - and trying to work out what the story was. 

For instance, I have long been experimenting with showing the shrapnel blast to human scale.

(I traced each fragment and then rearranged them in a circle - not too much order to the pieces - mainly the larger bits on the outside to give the shape some definition.)

The blasted fragments are interesting in themselves but need a person there to make them relevant.

 

By putting them in a circular pattern I maybe is represented their real shape when exploding - this is a trade off. Their actual shape was more like a cross section of a red blood cell - but this would have been too much information.

This work is an alignment of a selection of discretely relevant and interoperable parts that, together make a coherent whole.

Signposting

The relationship between the primary element - the gun and the crew and the flak stats is a sound one.

The gun is the first thing you see and is also on the 'floor'of the graphic. The stats are in the 'air of the graphic. I did wonder if one would read the stats first but i think most would see and inquire after the gun and crew first. The gun is setting up the rest of the graphic without being too obtrusive.

Human Figures

I drew the gun in some detail - with sharp, straight, geometric lines. I wanted the crew to be different.

Their colorings give first a sense of their function and place, but maybe together, these different colours indicate their difference and humanity. They also remind us that this is a representation of a crew - this 'means' a crew - it is not *actually* a crew and therefore does nt need to look exactly like one. (if this is getting a bit close to bluffers semiotics, I'll stop as most of that is pretty pointless - more on that another day)

So if the crew didn't need to be exactly realistic, what should they look like?

I thought the machine gun crew were too sketchy perhaps. I thought the glider crewwere about right for their size - but if these folks were going to have a decent space on the page, they would need a degree of detail because things at distance have a constant level of detail and if we are close up and are beige given a lack of detail, there will be a reason. 

It was one thing to draw the filled outlines - a staple of comic art. But then I went a bit further and added some very rough lighter and darker shades to them. I wanted a quality of the vague/precise that Javier Zarracina's news graphics have. 

You can recognize what is being shown.

You can reflect in the natural and human qualities of the subject material.

Most importantly - there is still room for the imagination to fill in some of the gaps  and not too much render so that you ask unnecessary questions.

So - this graphic marks a satisfying place in my journey of hopeful improvement - its just after two years of doing these. 

Improvements made so far:

- signposting and data balance

- inclusion and representation of people

- more disciplined use of colour

Still to improve:

- typography systems

- conceptual innovation in layout/ data vis

- boldness 

The above sounds a little clinical - like a Terminator dispassionately repairing it's own arm - but there is really no point doing anything if you don't want to improve.

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.

WWII Magazine Graphics on Flickr

I have put all the WWII Magazine graphics on flickr.

There will be other stuff posted onto my pages but that's it for starters.

I figured that is is a nice and easy place for them all to be seen at once.

Do remember though that there is plenty of insight into why the graphics were done like they were on this blog too, so don't 'just look at the pictures'.

In fact never 'just look at the pictures' - it's what many designers do and it is why they are a little bit thick:)

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.