Prevent a complete view of an object or composition.

Hiding creates desire and stirs curiosity by denying access. It’s our nature to want to lift the veil or peek behind the curtain—especially if we’re told we can’t. We can all identify with Pandora’s predicament when Zeus gives her a box and tells her not to open it.

In the cover design below, we’re denied the identity of the photographer’s subject. She has censored the photographer, and the designer (Margaret Bauer) has given that censorship center stage. We want to see the face behind those hands. We want to know who she is and why she’s hiding. We’re curious.

It’s smart design. Hidden faces are common in snapshot photography, but not common on photography-book covers. And by choosing this photo, Bauer represents many faces without even showing one.

Margaret Bauer cover design for The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Hiding makes the ordinary interesting, as illustrated in this half-title page for David Carson’s The End of Print. Half-title pages appear at the beginning of almost every book, and customarily contain one thing: the book’s title. Here, the ordinary element is hidden by a Schwitter’s-style collage element, making it both interesting to look at and an iteration of the book’s central message.

Detail from the half-title page of David Carson’s The End of Print. 1995.

Nothing is more typographically ordinary than Helvetica. Here, Nikolaus Troxler uses hiding to both acknowlege and change that:

Poster design for the 50 Years Helvetica at the Museum fur Gestaltung Zürich. Niklaus Troxler, 2007.

Of course, in some instances hiding eliminates the objectionable—as in this censoring of George Carlin’s 1972 list of “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” (apologies to Mr. Troxler for the adaptation).

In his cover design for One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, Evan Gaffney demonstrates how hiding establishes a new hierarchy. By covering a traditional, wedding-style typographic treatment with a more crass, cash-register-receipt version of the same words, he illustrates commercialism superseding sentiment.

Cover design for One Perfect Day (Penguin Press). Evan Gaffney, 2007

Hiding acknowledges an understanding between the designer and viewer. In these two Mademoiselle covers, Bradbury Thompson hides the title behind the model with confidence that the reader will still identify the magazine. He knows we know, and so, he’s free to create interest by re-ordering the planes.

Mademoiselle magazine covers by Bradbury Thompson. February 1950 and June 1952.

In this last example, hiding for censorship is inverted. It’s not high design, but it is excellent satire (and my favorite example of hiding from the past ten years). Beware! Your pop-culturally mal-conditioned mind will render this highly objectionable. You’ve been warned. Now, please enjoy.

“Unneccesary Censorship” from the Jimmy Kimmel Live show. ABC, 2009.

Emanate an object or objects from a given point.

Radiating evokes the sun—rays issuing forth from an essential center. It evokes the wheel—spokes joined at a central hub. It evokes pilgrimage and adoration. The center of a radiation is powerful and primary.

To radiate is show dynamic release or undeniable attraction. It is to show that the rays themselves have a central theme, a commonality. They come from the same source. And they are rays—they point to their source—even while moving away from it.

A. This Caslon ornament is a basic “radiate” illustration—simple graphic lines indicate the sun’s rays while drawing attention toward the facial features at the center. B. An asterisk (literally, tiny star). C. Minimal, radiating strokes representing a blinking light. D. Short, radiating strokes in perspective (and contained) representing radioactivity. (A = Adobe Caslon Pro; B = Zapf Dingbats; C and D = Apple Symbols)

Typographic radiation can be very effective for all of the reasons outlined above. In this example by Futurist Fortunato Depero, the center becomes highly charged by the typographic rays, and the rays in turn are unified by their core.

Detail of a page from Depero Futurista. Fortunato Depero, 1927.

The cunning typographic rays in this example shout from the mouth of the diva (Jennifer Lewis) while simultaneously forming an “X”—thus, diva + dismissed.

Poster for The Diva is Dismissed (Public Theater, New York). Paula Scher, 1994.

This 1948 wheel-chart from MFA Feeds, correlates weight, market value, and interest for various farm products. While the radiating lines help the user to connect values represented on the outside of the disk with those on the inside, they also act as repetitive pointers to the MFA Feeds company mark at the center.

Wheel diagram from Jessica Helfand’s amazing collection, Reinventing the Wheel. Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Here radiating lines of type represent the feathers of the ungrateful peacock, complaining to Juno about its sorry voice.

Page from Marc Chagall: Fables of La Fontaine, design by [sic]. New Press, 1997.

 

Detail from Marc Chagall: Fables of La Fontaine.

And here are a host of radiating graphics from Penguin books: two explosions, a four-leaf emanation, bombs for a halo, and humans at the center of their environment.

(top row) Penguin cover design: The Rebel, Albert Camus; Nuclear Reactions, W.M. Gibson; and Orbitals and Symmetry, D.S. Urch. (second row) Penguin cover design for Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel and an interior spread from McLuhan & Fiore’s The Medium is the Message. (from Phil Baine’s excellent book, Penguin by Design. Penguin, 2005.)

And despite what this design intimates, for the expectant parent the central focus is not the proper pram (or the company that makes it).

Cover design for Baby Jogger catalog, 2009

Change to another language.

Illustration is translation (ideas, forms, and objects translated into a new form). Typography is translation (language translated into form). And language itself is translation (ideas translated to spoken, written, and typographic form). Needless to say (though I’ll say it anyway), translation as a design trick is a very broad term. Actually it’s a category of tricks in which the designer says to the viewer, “I’m going to turn this into something else to help you understand it better.”

The queen of all translation designs has to be the Rosetta Stone. Before its discovery by Napoleon’s forces in 1799 (and translation, 23 years later), Egyptian hieroglyphics were an impenetrable code. The Stone (now in the collection of the British Museum) shows three versions of the same text: one in Greek, one in Demotic, and one in hieroglyphics. With this translation key in hand, scholars were able to figure out that hieroglyphic symbols functioned phonetically, thus cracking the code. (For an step-by-step explanation of the Rosetta Stone’s translation, click here.)

The Rosetta Stone. 196 BC.

Another amazing moment in translation design is Christopher Plantin’s Biblia Polyglotta (1568–73). Its spreads feature six translations simultaneously (Hebrew, Hebrew-to-Latin, Greek, Greek-to-Latin, Aramaic, and Aramaic-to-Latin). No, it’s not a mult-culti party bible. It is, however, a valuable scholarly tool for comparing and understanding changes introduced by translations. Plantin’s feat of balancing six translations of varying length also makes it one of the most skillful displays of layout in letterpress printing ever.

Spread from Biblia Polyglotta. Christopher Plantin, 1568–73.

But these are obvious examples of translation in design—language-to-language translation. The translation playground for design minds is in the less obvious: language-to-form, form-to-language, form-to-form, style-to-form, and form-to-style.

Consider these translations of typographic style to forms of transportation from Adrian Frutiger’s Type Sign Symbol:

From Type Sign Symbol. Adrian Frutiger, 1980.

Or this translation between typographic form and historical/architectural style from Clayton Whitehill’s odd little book, The Moods of Type:

From Moods of Type. Clayton Whitehill, 1947.

And here, another typographic translation—this one from Bradbury Thompson’s design for a 1958 issue of Westvaco’s Inspirations for Printers:

From Westvaco Inspirations for Printers. Bradbury Thompson, 1958.

Of course, type nerd that I am, I’ve provided only typographic examples. Fear not, this is but a brief introduction to the vast Translate category. Many, many more to come…