By Wayne Pereanu
“Anybody can do visual design,” said Yael Fitzpatrick, as she opened a workshop on visual communication at DCSWA’s 2019 Professional Development Day. Fitzpatrick, consulting art director and brand manager of Gazelle Design Consultancy, shared over a dozen visual design tips in her talk “Communicating Visually: Sharing Science Beyond Words.”
She said there are two questions that guide any kind of visual: “What is the message?” and “Who is the audience?”
Fitzpatrick stressed that these questions should not only be addressed before starting, but also repeatedly as work progresses.
Typography matters. After admonishing the use of Comic Sans (which was described as “the sweatpants of fonts”), Fitzpatrick advised sticking to non-flashy typefaces. She also recommended limiting any design to two typefaces, three at most, to provide a sense of cohesion.
Fitzpatrick emphasized the importance of using metaphors as a way to make content approachable and memorable for an audience. She shared a childhood memory of receiving a subscription to Omni magazine and reading an article about black holes. The article described the pull of a black hole as hanging off a bridge with the population of Canada pulling down on your ankles. Fitzpatrick said the metaphor was so vivid that it’s stuck in her mind for years. She encouraged the audience to find the same kind of imagery to help readers.
An assortment of specific suggestions were sprinkled throughout the talk. These tips ranged from avoiding word clouds (described as “the equivalent of 100 people talking at once in the same tone and volume”) to remembering to take into consideration that a large part of our readership is likely colorblind.
After a twenty-minute crash course into the nuts and bolts of design, workshop participants split up into groups of three or four to practice what had been taught. People were encouraged to share stories they were working on. For the next hour, each group discussed how to best visually depict them, asking questions such as “What is the message you want to convey?” and “Do you have a metaphor you could use to show that?”
The workshop concluded with each group presenting one of their stories along with the visual component that they had developed.
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