Comics as a Design Ecosystem: A Case for Comics in Design Education

This philosophy, and others like it, are those that most fundamentally contextualize the field of Design from the larger, overarching area of “the arts.” This differentiation still demands a degree of subjectivity, but is one upon which designers and design scholars typically agree. Ohio State’s Department of Design defines its role in its own website as, “We define design as a purposeful, systematic, and creative activity” (The Ohio State University Department of Design). To further elaborate, in a 1998 article in Critique Magazine, Michael Brady says:

Design is utilitarian in a way that art is not. Design is the how of a thing: how to order the parts, how to serve the client’s interests, how to convey the information. Art, on the other hand, is its own end. It isn’t utilitarian. It subordinates ordinary usefulness to its own purposes. It doesn’t concern itself with description the way illustration does, nor with the desires of the buyer as does fashion, nor the tastes of the public as does style. (Brady par. 4)

To paraphrase, the various fields of design (notably graphic design, interior space design and industrial design) are distinguished from the overarching field of “the fine arts” because they rely intensely on content and context. A painting, and an artist’s painting practice, can exist without any easily recognizable content. For instance, abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko made paintings about painting. Design cannot function this way, as it is a purpose-driven creative exercise. Content is what drives all fields of design. Context, however, is what guides it. Without appropriate context, the content inherent to all designed things exists without any plan, purpose, or reason.

Design Drawing and its Importance

“Drawing is just as legitimate and useful a tool for thinking and problem-solving as language or mathematics: it just happens to be neglected in conventional education.” —William Kirby Lockard

Drawing is a crucial component in design education. Many design programs, especially those housed in larger departments of Fine Art, teach a fine art approach to drawing, which can often stress self-expression, setting a mood, or creating art derived by some form of inspiration. However, design programs that are able to distinguish themselves typically incorporate some form of Design Drawing.

One of the basic cognitive benefits of sketching is that the mere acts [sic] of formulating a mental image in a concrete way on paper makes it possible for the designer to reflect over the concept at once and almost instantly develop it further into a new concept, a so called [sic] iteration. When working in teams, sketching is a valuable tool for creative group activities such as brainstorming and concept evaluation. (Olofsson & Sjölén 5)

Design Drawing is set apart from other forms of drawing in a manner similar to how design is set apart from other modes of creative action. Its focus is inherently utilitarian in a way that other methods of drawing are not. Its primary focus is presenting and delivering information, with stylistic choices being applied to support that goal. In teaching design drawing, emphasis is placed on clarity, communication of form, communication of believable space, as well as on an economy, or efficiency, of information. Due to the many professional restrictions placed on designers, concision is often crucial to the design process, even in the areas that incorporate drawing. Additionally, all designers, and industrial designers in particular, benefit from the development of “persuasive sketches,” often called renderings, which have the purpose of communicating everything outlined above, but with a more detailed and stylized appearance. This form of sketching is meant to “sell” the proposed design to project managers, clients, users, or others who may prove influential to the project. (Olofsson & Sjölén 5) Due to their relatively “flashy” or stylized appearance, focus on smooth lines and dramatic line weights, dramatic angles, and communicative purposes, persuasive sketches often appear more like concept art for films or even comic illustrations.

Why Comics?

“Good art sends a different message to everyone. Good design sends the same message to everyone.” —John O’Nolan, web designer

The overall field of comics is a natural fit with the overall field of design, as it requires a similar mode of thinking of its content creators. This is because much like design, the comics medium is meant to accomplish a specific goal, providing the same narrative experience to all readers. Readers are meant to internalize comic narratives in the same way, so as to develop the same narrative experience regardless of personal background. Scott McCloud emphasizes the potential for comics to connect one person’s mind to another, using graphic components to see what another person sees and experience an abstraction of what another person experiences. (McCloud 194, 198)

Design requires practitioners to develop or anticipate an empathy with their targeted users, to understand not just what needs to be designed, but how and why. Comics have a history of developing empathy and creating an emotional bond between reader and protagonist. Chris Ware’s Building Stories and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth are both widely regarded for their powerful, empathetic protagonists. Other known works in the comics medium that tend to yield an intense, empathetic connection include Judd Winnick’s Pedro and Me, Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, and Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve series.

Because Design requires all of its targeted users to have homogeneous experiences, this is usually done through clarity and focus on communication. Visual communication requires a focus on the most important information and typically involves a re-structuring of information into hierarchies. Design drawing, as it relates to Industrial and Interior design, often requires a focus on form, materials, texture, and other information that may prove important to users, clients, project managers, funding sources, and engineers or manufacturers. As stated earlier, comics require readers to experience the same narrative in the same way, and objects are illustrated with a similar focus. Milton Caniff, Walter Simonson, and Sean Gordon Murphy are all examples of comic artists who excel at presenting form and texture, light and shadow. This clarity is how readers understand that a room is a dungeon, or a scientist’s laboratory, or that Thor’s hammer is made out of metal with a leather-wrapped handle.

The narrative of a comic or graphic novel requires a thorough, visual demonstration of how things are interacted with. In a prose novel, an author may choose to describe a particular action or advice in relatively vague terminology. In the comics format, the illustrator is required to consider how someone might interact with the product, system, or space in an appropriate manner, which then requires the illustrator to consider interfaces, layout, and user experiences much as a designer does. (Denison 70) In his 2013 MFA thesis, When Designers Ask, “What If?”, E. Scott Denison poses the following set of questions:

How might something be held, or touched? Is it soft and sculpted? Is it small and round? What movements of the body or limbs might it require? How do the resulting behaviors play in a social or personal context? (Denison 70)

Clarity of storytelling is not limited to interactions, materials, or locations, however, and requires a developed sense of rhythm, movement, and sensitivity to nuance. It requires artists to tell their stories in a holistic way, holding on to the organization of their story as they develop each individual illustration. In addition to his high levels of artistic craftsmanship, Sean Gordon Murphy’s body of work also contains a highly developed sensitivity to this kind of holistic, nonverbal communication. In particular, Punk Rock Jesus, Murphy’s 2012 passion project miniseries from Dark Horse Comics, has been critically praised for its artwork, storytelling, and high concepts. I routinely use samples from Murphy’s portfolio website as examples to teach design majors about nonverbal storytelling. Although his drawing style is incredibly different, David Aja’s work on the 2012 Hawkeye series, written by Matt Fraction, has seen a similar high quality of visual narrative. Aja’s work stands out the most in Hawkeye #11 (2013), an issue told entirely from the point of view of Hawkeye’s pet dog, Lucky. Because Lucky is a normal dog and does not speak any human languages, all dialogue is reduced to hatch marks, with the occasional word a dog might understand included for comedic effect. Additionally, Lucky is able to communicate through other senses, most notably smell. Fraction, Aja, and letterer Chris Eliopoulos collaborate to present an iconified identification system outlining the networks of smells and sounds Lucky processes, giving us a greater insight into the mind of a dog, and refining a new method of nonverbal storytelling for the field of comics.

Aside from the reasons listed above, there are a few other, deeper connections that can be made using the language of comics. The first of these is pattern recognition and “chunking.” Comics theorist Scott McCloud states that human beings have such a natural predilection for pattern recognition that we see human faces in any set of markings containing two dots and a line. The abstraction of this type of icon should not be thought of as having eliminated particular information, but rather, having focused in on important information. (McCloud 31-33) Game design theorist Raph Koster refers to this concept as “chunking,” and simplifies this idea by stating, “the brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant.” Human beings rely on this function of “chunking” all the time, with just about every task we do. (Koster 18-22) Understanding this economy of information is crucial to any creative activity that seeks to present complex information and have it understood clearly and quickly.

The second of these is comics’ natural inclination toward an economy of representation. McCloud also speculates on “non-visual self-awareness,” which suggests that people respond to cartoons and other simplified face icons because the simplicity of these images seems in line with what the viewer feels as “their” face. This allows the specifics of the icon to take a backseat, and allows viewers to project themselves onto it. He theorizes that if what the icon looks like matters less, what it says will matter more. (McCloud 24-37) This concept is beautifully illustrated in Pixar’s 2013 animated short, The Blue Umbrella, directed by Saschka Unseld, which emphasizes the facial characteristics of manmade objects. By focusing on a more iconified system of visuals, readers are more free to empathize with the characters in the narrative. This is important for designers to understand, as they are often required to be fast, efficient, and economical with their creative choices while remaining clear and visually appealing.

Ohio State Design: The Case Study

The Ohio State University’s Department of Design has three undergraduate majors: Industrial Design (typically connected to the design of products, furniture, and tools), Interior Space Design (the creation of spaces that serve specific purposes), and Visual Communication Design (graphic, or visual design in all of its forms, most typically understood as graphic design for print and web, but quickly evolving). OSU presented a three-course Design Drawing sequence for many years. I was an instructor of this sequence to first-year design students from 2007–2009, and later from 2012–2013, when I became the Design Foundations Coordinator, overseeing all courses in the first-year design foundations area, including the design drawing sequence. The first course, Descriptive & Analytical Drawing, was an observational drawing class that emphasized line drawing, clarity, and communication. The second course, Drawing Systems, was built on the drawing techniques surrounding architectural and engineering graphics, and the related applications of those techniques. The third course, Graphic Thinking, was the course that became my pet project. Intended to be a course that prepared students to draw conceptually, with no observational information or specific guidelines presented to them, it incorporated perspective drawing, scale, the drawing of inside and outside spaces, textural analysis, and narrative.

When I was initially assigned to teach Graphic Thinking, its focus had grown diluted, and a faculty-led redesign of the course content was assigned by departmental administration. Reasons cited were that the course had been handed down between graduate instructors and adjunct faculty for some time, allowing for its original objectives to be lost. It focused heavily on perspective drawing, but perspective assignments were built around drawing boxes and shapes, and not actual objects or spaces. Additionally, the final project was a storyboard project that typically yielded children’s-book-style illustrations of fairy tales. Several instructors collaborated to identify the original learning objectives and revise content and assignments to better reflect them. As a lifelong devotee to the comics format, I looked to the art form of comics to assist my own contributions to course revision, to help support the pedagogical gaps, and to meet students’ needs. Following our revision of the course, a new scope for presentation and new long-term objectives were defined. Under the revised course, the class projects grew in scope and complexity, beginning with simple one-point perspective drawing and expanding in complexity. As assignments progressed, concepts and techniques built upon themselves, adding in more perspective points, complex forms in perspective, ellipses and round forms in perspective, texture studies, and explorations of space and scale. The assignments finally culminated in a sequential art narrative meant to showcase all of the skills learned throughout the quarter. The creation of a lengthy final project based on the language of comics was the pinnacle, and the most broadly-reaching project in the new version of the class.