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

Invite comparison by placing objects near one another.

Juxtaposition creates a problem for the viewer to solve. Why are these two things placed together? What’s their relationship? The connection can be obvious, as in Paul Rand’s famous IBM-rebus poster. In that equation Eye + Bee + M = IBM. Problem solved. And the process of solving it makes you feel good about a giant computer company. And that’s effective design.

In his poster for the Freedom Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, Lester Beall juxtaposes the Statue of Liberty—with her raised torch—and a distraught woman with hand raised in the Deutscher Gruß (the “German greeting” or Hitler salute). Between the two—Liberty and Hitler—stands a “fence” of lines:

Poster for the Freedom Pavilion, 1939 World’s Fair, New York. Lester Beall, 1939.

Flattened, the juxtaposition might look like this:

Or flattened still further:

The crying woman in Beall’s poster is actually silhouetted from a 1938 photo of three woman witnessing the Nazi march into Eger, Hungary. The complete picture is itself a study in juxtaposition: the woman on the left looks anything but distraught; the woman in the middle wears a somewhat blank expression, but has a resolute salute; and the third woman, as we’ve seen, is crying. Juxtaposition here has a very different effect. We assumed that, when she appeared alone, the woman on the right was distraught. Who wouldn’t be? The Nazis have just marched in (and she’ll be separated from Liberty). But with “happy” and “resolute” nearby, the image is more open to interpretation.

“People of Cheb salute the German troops entering the town in the Anschluss of the Sudetenland in October 1938.” (Wikimedia Commons).

Of course, juxtaposition isn’t all Nazis and Liberty (though opposites do lend themselves well to the practice). It can highlight minor differences as well, asking the viewer to look closer, offering room to contemplate—as in this painting by Joseph Albers:

Homage to the Square, Joseph Albers, 1965. (Wikimedia Commons)