- It wasn't particularly easy to make a photograph
before the advent of digital cameras.
Easy to use cameras for the general public
required rolls of film
and processing that wasn't inexpensive.
That's why there's only one shoebox
of the photos taken by my grandparents.
Today however, it's easy to make a photograph.
In fact, it's so easy that every two minutes
humans take more photos than ever existed
since the invention of photography.
It's a great way to document
every moment of your child's life,
but has the side effect
of many clients believing that they are photographers,
and supplying the designer with less than stellar images.
Again, in this instance, type is your friend.
Rather than attempting to hide the image by making it tiny,
use it to create an effect and convey the idea.
Some of the best solutions embrace the bad photo,
but put the type out front and center.
Briggs brilliantly applied aggressive and bold typography
with dynamic angles to offset soft images
of theatrical productions.
There are instances when the photograph is good,
but a solution that simply presents it with some nice type
is nothing but a polite layout.
There isn't much of a concept.
On a book for the 19th century photographer Francis Frith
on Egypt and lost worlds,
I shifted the image to bleed off the edge of the page
and wrap around on the inside.
This produced a sense of tension for the viewer
faced with a largely black cover and incomplete image.
The concept of uncovering something hidden
connected with the photographs of ancient monuments.
Sometimes it's best to let something be just what it is.
Henry Wolf designed a call for entries
for an AIJ competition of paperback book covers.
The solution is exactly that.
A paper back.
The type on the side reads as a spine of a book.
The silhouette photo does nothing more
than ask the viewer to recognize it is a person.
Too much detail would stop the viewer,
and confuse the message
with questions such as, Who is that?
What is he wearing?
And so on.
Simplicity and a sharp focus on the primary message
is the only necessity.
The movie The Misfits
is the story of a group of lost characters
set in the Nevada desert.
George Nelson was tasked with designing the poster.
But how can one communicate the idea of misfits?
Showing a scene from the film tells the viewer little.
Nelson ingeniously created the forms of a jigsaw puzzle
that can never fit together.
The studio required images of the three stars,
Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift
on the poster.
Faced with three images
from three different photographers and styles,
Nelson printed them as duotones.
This eliminated any distractions,
and forces the viewer to solve the puzzle.
When faced with a bad image taken on someone's phone,
embrace it.
Find the concept, and make the image work for you.
It may require asking the type to do the heavy lifting,
or adjusting the layout to convey the idea.
Hiding the image
or trying to pretend it's good rarely works.
The goal is still to produce a dynamic and resonant concept
that engages the viewer.