The aim of the news is to report on the happenings of a certain subject with as much detail as possible, to be objective and not saturated with statistics, whilst keeping it interesting and readable.
Some news is interesting enough to read, and then you want to know more about it. With other news you can look at a headline and skip it over as the headline doesn’t appeal. I wanted to communicate the information in the story just by playing with the headline. Being able to sum up the story in just a few pictures means instead of reading the headline and making your mind up, you can see the headline, and in seeing the headline graphically you see the emotion of the story, giving you a greater insight than what you would get with words.
Pictogram Sketches
A few screens from my sketchbook show some early pictogram ideas, where I try to visualise the headlines in small graphics. They are really rough ideas and generally have a few versions of graphics for the same words as I try to find the one that most represents that word. When they are finally illustrated on the computer they are cleaned up and simplified.
“Baseball steroid report names star players” - The Guardian
Below shows a sketch for the baseball headline above. First to represent ‘baseball’, the bat and ball. For ‘steroid’, a pill or substance on its own wouldn’t of worked as it could mean anything, but a pill inside a bicep illustrates the word better. “Report” is shown as a document. A bunch of peoples names represent “names”. “Star” is pretty self explanatory, and “players” is shown as small people icons in different colours.
Below shows in order from left to right, a beer, a cash register, a changeover of money, an arrow pointing down, a toilet plunger, a person stood infront of a Union Jack, a hand telling the dog to stay, a stop sign, apartments, a house.
Yes, my sketches are usually this bad, and my handwriting sucks too.
I have a bunch more sketches in my book but I really don’t want to bore you with chicken scratch handwriting and scribbles of things that won’t really mean much to you.
