Emphasize a portion of an image, object, or composition by enlarging and reframing.

Cropping (or reframing) is an essential design skill and a powerful design trick. It can be a complex and chaotic world, and choices need to be made about what will be seen and what won’t—what should be emphasized and what shouldn’t—who makes it into the frame and who doesn’t. Cropping is editing. And editing makes communication clearer by reinforcing the basic message and minimizing the extraneous.

Use cropping to draw attention to a specific part of a photo, illustration, or composition—zeroing in on whatever best communicates your message. Extreme cropping can reveal the resolution of an image (pixels, film grain, tool marks, etc.), further accentuating the effect.

In this promotion for Restaurant Florent, M&Co uses cropping to focus attention on the mouth of a typical New Yorker. The crop is tight enough to reveal the film grain.

And the reason for the tight crop? The talker has the day’s menu is writ small all over his open mouth.

Cropping can also be a storytelling device (for an entertaining and informative explanation of cropping/framing as a narrative device, see Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art). By using the frame edge to eliminate a portion of the image the subject can be made to come (arrive/enter) or go (exit/escape), rise (elevate/levitate) or fall (descend/drop).

For this 2wice cover design, Abbott Miller has used an unconventional crop to indicate both the motion of dance and the wildness of “Animal”.

Cropping can abstract an image. On the cover of McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Chip Kidd achieves artistry (where obviousness was a clear danger) with a smart crop of the horse.

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)

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…