A true work of art is one whose imperfect beauty makes an artist of the viewer.
Apple used it in launching the original iPhone in 2007 as well as in its entertaining “I’m a Mac” commercials. David Chase used it in the groundbreaking final episode of The Sopranos. Cadbury used it in its “In the Air” commercial, which went viral on YouTube. Hollywood uses it all the time in movie trailers. Agatha Christie was the undisputed heavyweight champion of it. Mike Nichols used it in the famous underwater pool scene in The Graduate. Screenwriter and director J. J. Abrams has built a phenomenal career around it. In-N-Out Burger uses it with its menu. Sudoku relies on it, as do comic books, crossword puzzles, and text messaging. Leonardo da Vinci used it to paint the Mona Lisa, and Paul Cezanne became known for it. The New Yorker exploits it for its popular cartoon caption contest. The Japanese poet Fujiwara no Teika believed it to be at the heart of true art. And long before all of them, ancient Chinese gardens were designed around it. And I’m using it to write this paragraph.
With any luck, that first paragraph raised a question in your mind about the “it.” In case you haven’t figured it out from my admittedly clumsy clues, the it is incomplete information. Zen artists call it yugen, which means “subtlety,” and it is the focus of the third law of subtraction: Limiting information engages the imagination.
Artfully incomplete or limited information creates intrigue, piques curiosity, heightens anticipation, and triggers our fascination through what my friend Sally Hogshead labels mystique. Sally knows a thing or two about fascination, having written a bestselling book called Fascinate. Here’s Sally on mystique:
Eye-catching enough to get noticed, yet complex enough to stay interesting. Revealing enough to pique curiosity, yet shadowy enough to prompt questions. Mystique flirts with us, provoking our imagination, hinting at the possibilities, inviting us to move closer while eluding our grasp. It doles out information, without ever actually giving anything away…. [T]his trigger is rooted in unfulfillment … is the most nuanced and perhaps most difficult to achieve. Mystique invites others closer without giving them what they seek. A delicate balance to be sure, but successfully achieved, it’s fascination’s exemplar. Mystique can add anticipation and curiosity to any relationship, from new business pitches to social invitations, by motivating others to return for more.
Well said. And with that fine prologue, allow me to introduce you to a modern master of mystique whose work fascinates over 2 million people each and every day.
You don’t need to see the masthead to know that the person four rows ahead of you on the airplane is reading the Wall Street Journal. You can tell at a glance. It has nothing to do with the paper—you can tell even if someone is reading it on an iPad—and there’s nothing truly unique about the page layout. All you need to do is catch a glimpse of one of those tiny, fascinating, yet minimal portraits of someone prominent. You know the ones I’m talking about: countless little dots only, yet utterly photorealistic. You can’t help but marvel at them. The Wall Street Journal’s portrait style has become its trademark. It’s called a hedcut,* and it was Kevin Sprouls who created it in 1979.
Here’s Kevin, by his own hand:
I am sure you realize by now that what you see is not really there, that you’re looking at an advanced handcrafted optical illusion. All that’s really there, of course, are dots and white space, and it is the art of the space between the carefully placed dots that engages your brain to recall patterns and participate in the act of rendering the final image. Kevin achieves an enormous level of detail through minimal means by making you an active collaborator and exploiting the gestalt principle of closure, which is your brain’s way of mentally completing that which is incomplete, using patterns grooved from past experience. (I’ll say more about closure in the second half of this chapter.)
Kevin also prompts you to wonder: How do they do that? He makes you work just hard enough that you’re aware that there is something different and unique here, that it’s not a photograph (which you wouldn’t look twice at) but something more interesting so that you lean forward for a closer look. “Leaning forward” is the first goal in attracting others to whatever it is you’re offering. The longer they lean forward, the longer they remain engaged, which is the ultimate goal of crafting any experience.
Kevin has kept people leaning forward for over 30 years. He trained the artists who carry on the style he created at the Journal, keeping the tradition alive long after he moved on to broaden his illustrative horizons. His work has been featured in Smithsonian magazine, and his pen is housed in the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Thousands of people all over the world have tried to copy and computerize his craft, to no avail. His art can only be done painstakingly by hand.
I contacted Kevin and spent a good bit of time chatting with him to understand his methodology, because his iconic style is a good metaphor for the way limited information can be used to create clarity far more compelling and indelible in the viewer’s mind than something perfectly concrete and complete.
“It began when I was in high school,” Kevin tells me. “I think I was around fifteen at the time. I had this friend, a bit older than me, who worked in an architect’s office. He left that job, but he took this set of brand new Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens. They’re these technical pens with a really fine point. He knew I was big into art and drawing, so he gave them to me. I started playing around with them. I could make these precise little marks. They lend themselves to detail, the pointillistic or ‘stipple’ technique. I basically taught myself, and I learned how to produce subtle tonal variations with minimal marks, dots, and lines. I loved the precision of it. I’ve been at it ever since. I brought those pens with me to art school. I was doing all kinds of drawings with those stupid things. In art school, my attraction to drawing with pens found me using the stipple technique in etchings and illustration assignments. Lines and etchings are actually much harder than dots, so art school really made me better.”
Kevin attended Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, all along continuing to hone his pointillist prowess. In his final year, he spent a semester in Rome, studying printmaking and sculpture. Perhaps not surprisingly, Kevin fell in love with bronze casting, clay modeling, and sculpture, discovering that he had flair for modeling from life. After graduation in 1977, he landed a freelance gig at Dow Jones & Company, parent to the Wall Street Journal.
“I got called to New York to talk to the art director,” Kevin recalls. “My roommate from art school referred me, and I ended up spending two years freelancing for the marketing department on the fourth floor of 22 Cortlandt Street learning the newspaper business and doing some fairly routine advertising stuff, lots of mechanicals and graphic design. I remember I played around a lot with letter spacing and typesetting, especially with the hot new typeface at the time, called Helvetica. The cafeteria was one floor up, and the Journal editors and reporters were above that on six. We all read the Journal as part of the job, and I got to know people there just by hanging out in the cafeteria.”
At that time, the Wall Street Journal did not use photographs except in advertisements and used very few illustrated portraits. “The Journal was famous for having no pictures,” explains Kevin. “The one exception was when they used a photograph to show Ted Kennedy’s route during the Chappaquiddick incident. They had a guy I think in South Carolina doing the portraits. Hedcuts, they called them. He was using soft pencil on coquille board, which is a pebbled surface. One day in the cafeteria, I asked the page one editor, Glynn Mapes, to try me out on a portrait, knowing I could give him something good. I really wanted to do illustration rather than the graphic work I was then engaged in. He said yes, probably out of convenience more than anything. I really just happened to be the right guy at the right time, in the right place. Still, they hired me to do some portraits, and I started developing a new style. I pulled out my trusty pens and started experimenting. It took me quite a while, mostly because of the technology of the printing press back then. When I started out, I was paid $75 per drawing. Eventually, they dropped the previous artist and began using me exclusively. Eventually, they hired me full-time, and I began to train other artists we deemed had the talent, skill, and, really, discipline—it takes six to eight hours to do one of these.”
In some of those early experiments, Kevin included lines with the dots. The challenge was getting the hair and clothing just right. After several iterations over the course of several months, his current style—dots only—came into focus. “It took a lot of experimenting,” he explained to me. “I finally figured out that if I drew the image at a larger size of three inches by five inches and reduced it to a third of the size to fit the half-column width, which at the time was seven and a half picas, dialed down the camera exposure—I was always fighting with the camera guys who wanted to overexpose everything, which kills detail—I could achieve just the right contrast that gives it that three-dimensional quality. I could get the impact and nuance and subtlety I was after.”
I asked Kevin why he thought the portraits still hold such fascination for people in light of all the advanced multimedia technology used currently to produce the Journal. “I think the technique is successful in the Journal because it comes off as engraving work, as in stock certificates, as in currency. It is very small, but people still remark on the art of it, even as the Journal of today is quite a splashy visual affair. I think the drawings are perceived as things of quality, things well made, like fine jewelry. The detail, and the small scale, and probably the uniqueness of being a piece of black-and-white line art that renders a unique photoreal image invite curiosity and closer inspection. These factors differentiate this art form from all the other glaring distractions in the paper—the full-color, large-scale photography, advertising, etcetera etcetera.”
Kevin left the Journal in 1987 to head for the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, where he spends his winter days hunched over a drafting table overlooking a lagoon, dotting away. He splits his time between there and Long Beach Island, where he has a summer bungalow. “My day starts around ten in the morning, and I go through to about eleven at night,” he tells me. “This stuff takes a long time!”
So just how does the process unfold? I was more than curious, so I asked Kevin if he wouldn’t mind walking me through the key stages, with me as the subject.
It all begins with a good photograph. “I ask for something that is clear, in focus, with enough detail to work with in terms of highs and lows, contrast,” says Kevin. “Many of my clients send photos to work with that, I must say, can be challenging. They’re too small, low resolution, or a studio shot with direct light that washes out highlights, lowlights, shadows, and, really, the things that make a person real. The best shots are simple, shot with a good camera using natural light. I ask people to just go stand by a window and have someone take their picture. It’s more authentic than studio posing.”
Kevin’s arsenal of equipment is minimal: draftsman’s lead holder with HB lead, kneaded rubber eraser, Rapidograph pens, supply of ink, fine high-quality paintbrush and some white designer’s gouache to take care of any “adjustments” that might be necessary, tracing paper, illustration board, scanner, computer, and Adobe Photoshop software. The first step is to scan the photo, get it into Photoshop, and convert it to grayscale and then adjust certain levels, size it, and crop it.
“I print out the grayscale image and transfer the photo’s information onto illustration board by tracing on the photo,” Kevin explains. “The resulting contour drawing is like a map for me to follow. Everything is done by hand, one mark of the pen at a time.”
He then begins the step-by-step incremental process of placing dots meticulously on the illustration board. Clothing, hair, and eyes are the most challenging, and so Kevin focuses his attention there first. “Get that framework right,” he says, “and the rest is a matter of, um, connecting the dots.” On the next few pages you can see how he does just that.
“What constitutes a good-quality portrait in this style is the structure of the dot field,” Kevin tells me. “To produce that tonal effect, I align the marks into a grid matrix. All of us dotters, or stipple artists, have different looks and levels of quality. I understand that the Journal folks nowadays draw on thin paper over light boxes to produce their finished works. Something I would never do! My standard process is to trace the image onto the board, then ink it, while constantly referring to the photographic image.”
Here is the finished product, revealed after about six hours of hard work. If the portrait were going in the Wall Street Journal (unlikely in my case), this image would be reduced to roughly a third of the drawn size to fit into the newspaper column, which is about an inch wide. I’ve put the photograph and the hedcut side by side below. Ignoring the subject for a moment, which one is more interesting? Which one makes you want to lean in and take a closer look? Which one engages your brain more?
I find several things about this exercise instructive. If you’re able to make the mental leap of abstraction to see how it might apply to your unique challenge, I believe that what you’ll find below the surface is a subtractive creative approach that is indeed universally applicable in using minimum means to produce maximum effect.
It begins with the prestep of getting the starting point just right. Getting the proper starting image is the key; you need one with enough vivid detail to enable a clear endgame to be visualized. Too often in life it isn’t. People don’t recognize success because they don’t know what it looks like. There’s a reason everyone talks about the big picture. It’s difficult to remain fully engaged without that bigger picture, because our daily work is really about putting a little dot down each day, metaphorically speaking. Something needs to guide us in connecting them. If we are missing the mark, so to speak, we can usually trace it to a glaring absence of a compelling mental image to guide the effort. Pictures connect the right brain with the left and help us see the path more clearly.
The second item entails the actual construction of the new picture. When you’re creating a new reality, a good bit of the old one gets destroyed. But some things don’t change. In Kevin’s process, nearly all the detail of the starting image is removed: all but the outline and contours that define the person. In business, work, and life, that framework is often a combination of core values and purpose in life. The manner in which the ultimate vision is achieved and the way the endgame is rendered stylistically always change. That’s the creative part. What doesn’t change are the very things that define who we are: what we stand for, why we exist.
A third lesson concerns the discipline and incrementality of the work. If you scan the web, you’ll find many people who have tried and failed to reproduce Kevin’s craft in ways that shortcut the talent, skill, and painstaking effort required to produce his art. They are trying to eliminate the wrong thing: tradecraft. They want the final result in one big swag with the punch of a few computer keys. They want someone or something to do the work for them. They want the breakthrough effect without the hard work that goes with it. Too often we seek the grand-slam home run and forgo the ground ball single that gets us on base. Creativity and innovation in any field is a matter of increments. Ultimately, all the small steps reveal something altogether new and novel. Too often in work and life we force what amounts to a false choice between small steps and big leaps. It isn’t about choosing one or the other. It’s about achieving big leaps through small steps. Kevin’s work is a systematic pursuit dedicated to achieving the maximum effect with the minimum means. If everyone took his basic creative approach, we wouldn’t be dealing with so much excess everything.
The final thing I took away from the project concerns technique. I asked Kevin if he squints a lot. I asked him in all seriousness. In his book The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda mentioned “the squint”:
The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees—to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.
I began using and developing my ability to do the squint after reading that. The squint has become a go-to technique in nearly everything I attempt, no matter what the activity may be. Sometimes it’s a literal squint; sometimes it’s a figurative one. For example, when I’m involved in developing strategy, it’s a squint of sorts that helps me see the bigger picture; when I’m prioritizing goals and plans, it helps me focus; when I’m in the throes of execution—writing, speaking, coaching—it helps me create visual and verbal flow.
“Absolutely I squint, and I’ve got the wrinkles and reading glasses to prove it,” Kevin jokes. “But seriously, yes. Squinting shows you what to pay attention to, what to ignore. It helps me know when and where to add something or leave well enough alone. This work, and I guess any work if you think about it, is a constant process of focusing and unfocusing my eyes, working up close and then standing back, little details and the big picture. Or it should be, anyway.”
Few people have the artistic ability of Kevin Sprouls, yet everyone has the ability to connect the dots. In his 2012 book Too Big to Know, David Weinberger writes about how until the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, there were no street maps of Port-au-Prince. An organization called OpenStreetMap.org had satellite maps but the maps lacked street names in Port-au-Prince, which were sorely needed during the crisis. People from all over the world, predominantly expatriate Haitians, contributed the names so that the map filled up. The map was used by everyone from the U.S. Marines to the World Bank to the United Nations—people connected the dots and completed the picture, which sped up the rescue and relief efforts enormously.
We can all get better at using limited information to create engagement and spark our imagination. That’s where Ayesha-Mathews Wadhwa can help. Ayesha is the “chief pixel bender” of the San Francisco–based Pix-Ink, a design firm she founded to serve brand marketing to women. Her biography on the PixInkDesign.com site actually reads “Connecting the Dots.”
“Over the course of my fifteen years in design,” says Ayesha, “I’ve come to believe that in order to be creative, the one thing we absolutely must subtract is judgment. We must do that, because it gets in the way of imagination. We can do this only by recognizing and removing barriers to creativity.”
Barriers to creativity fall into two groups, according to Ayesha: habits and blocks. “Life conditions us into developing habits,” she explains. “Yes, they help us perform many of our daily activities, both personal and professional, and so become ingrained. James L. Adams, in his book Conceptual Blockbusting, identifies four blocks to creativity: perceptual blocks, emotional blocks, cultural/environmental blocks, and intellectual/expressive blocks. Combine habits and blocks and what you have is a formula for rigid thinking, or imagination that comes preset with judgment. Most of our formal education trains our judicial thinking, teaching us the ‘one correct way’ to solve a problem and to judge others’ solutions. When you add that to the overwhelm of the information age we all live in, I believe there is a strong case to be made for how limiting information actually engages the imagination.”
Ayesha put together an exercise especially for readers of The Laws of Subtraction, using a few simple illustrations to show how limiting information actually engages the imagination. “You’re probably familiar with the connect–the-dots puzzles we all solved as children: essentially you get a bunch of dots with numbers attached to them and connect the numbers with lines to get a specific figure or shape or design, like this.”
Connecting the above numbers 1 through 4 will lead to this shape: a diamond.
Great, problem solved! The mystery picture now reveals itself, and we feel validated that we’ve taken the information we’ve been given—the numbers—and connected the dots to create an intended form.
Now, what happens when you’ve been given these dots without numbers, as shown below: information has been limited or removed altogether. How does that invite your imagination to interact with these dots? This is where the fun really begins!
“In a span of 15 to 20 minutes, I generated a half dozen unique patterns or designs from the blank grid. If I kept going, I would most likely generate a dozen more, but the point of this exercise is to illustrate how limiting information engages the imagination. For me, this simple exercise reinforces Picasso’s famous quote: ‘To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.’”
On a typically warm southern California weekend in February, 20 of us are gathered at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art for a two-day seminar called “Making Comics.” I’m obviously not a cartoonist, but neither is half the class: there are teachers, engineers, architects, consultants, writers, editors, technologists, musicians, and one 14-year-old wunderkind of an aspiring graphic novelist. We all have at least three things in common: a desire to tell better stories, a fascination with imagination, and a love of imagery and visual thinking.
Each year nearly 150,000 people attend Comic-Con, the premier event for comics passionistas, manga mavens, anime auteurs, and graphic novel aficionados. The global market for comics of all types is huge; the art form is as old as the 3,200-year-old scenes painted on the tomb of Menna, the ancient Egyptian scribe. Hollywood’s current trend toward producing film versions of comics has helped bring what has traditionally been the nerdy side of life into the mainstream. Comics encompass anything that contains images juxtaposed in a deliberate sequence to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer. In short, comics are sequential art.
“Imagination is the mortar that holds comics together,” says the instructor, who is a staple feature at Comic-Con. “The true art is invisible.” He should know, as his seminal 1993 graphic treatise on the subject, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, remains the definitive discourse on the theory and art of comics.
His name is Scott McCloud, and he had me at “imagination.”
Three weeks earlier, I had spent the afternoon with Scott, and my interview with him had convinced me that I needed to experience further some of the things we discussed. He needed a break from the graphic novel he’s furiously trying to complete by working 11 hours a day, and I wanted to know more about the magic of this “invisible art.” I’m lucky: Scott and I live near each other, and unknown to us, his studio and my office had been in the same complex for years. Three days with Scott McCloud will turn your head around.
Scott McCloud wrote the popular Zot! comic book series from 1984 to 1991 before turning his attention to the theory of comics. The workshop I’m about to take is named after his 2006 book, Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels, which grew out of a longer course taught first at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and later adopted by a number of colleges, including MIT. For the last half decade or so, Scott has been splitting his time between doing the work and teaching the craft. I ask him how he became interested in the theoretical side of comics.
“I was the son of an engineer,” Scott tells me. “I looked at everything scientifically, which made cartooning a little hard. Things didn’t come to me as intuitively as I’d have liked. After a while you can’t fight your nature. It was organic. I just had a lot to say, lots of theories I wanted to tell people about. That’s where Understanding Comics came from, and it only made sense to use the medium to make the book.”
In 2008, Scott created a comic book for Google, explaining the inner workings of its then-new open source browser Google Chrome. The comic itself became an Internet phenomenon when it shipped ahead of the browser; for two days it was the only source of information about this major software release in the world. The New York Times said it was “akin to hiring Paul McCartney to write a jingle,” while Forbes called it “one of the friendliest technical descriptions the software industry has yet produced.”
You can see a sample on the next page.
“You do not need to know how to draw to be here today,” Scott announces as the workshop gets under way. “This is about visual communication, visual storytelling, not drawing. But you will draw. In fact, I’m going to throw you in the deep end right away.”
He does. We are given five minutes to draw this story: “A man is walking down the sidewalk, whistling. He meets an elephant. The elephant has a cell phone. The elephant hands the cell phone to the man. The man thanks the elephant and walks off a cliff.”
The story is random for a reason. Scott wants to see how you tell a story you’re not familiar with, one that has no context. “Draw, share, and critique are the three elements of this class,” he explains. “And by critique I mean only did it communicate or not? No one has to say ‘nice’ or ‘interesting’ or anything like that, just ‘is it a bicycle or an avocado?’ and why did that communicate clearly or not?”
Scott asks us to stand up and form a circle, based on how many frames it took us to draw the elephant story, fewest to most. One person had drawn it in 4 panels, one person in 25, and the rest of us were somewhere in the middle. It took me five, one per story sentence.
“The number doesn’t matter,” Scott explains. “You could do it in two. You could do it in twenty. What matters is clarity, and clarity depends on the choices you make. You must make five key choices when showing and telling any story: choice of moment, choice of frame, choice of image, choice of word, and choice of flow. That’s it.”
Choice of moment is about deciding which moments to include in the story and which to leave out. “So much of creativity is editing,” Scott says. “You can spew, but you have to edit. Pull out the long knives, folks. William Faulkner had it right when he said that in writing stories, you have to kill your darlings.”
Choice of frame is about choosing the right distance and angle to view those moments and where to trim them. “For example,” says Scott, “if you have your character full frame and facing out toward the reader, you’ve blocked your reader at the door. Have him turn slightly away and you invite the reader to step into the story.”
Choice of images is about rendering the characters and objects and environments in those frames clearly, and choice of word is about picking words that add valuable information and work well with the images around them. Choice of flow is about guiding the audience through the story, between panels or pages or screens. “Those five decisions are the difference between clear and convincing storytelling and a big confusing mess,” Scott informs us. “Today we are going to focus on the first three. No words today, friends.”
That launches us into the next exercise, which will consume the rest of the day: we are each given a secret six-sentence story to draw. The stories were even more weird, nonlinear, and random than the elephant story. Everyone got something different, and we could not reveal the script. Scott gave us 20 minutes to draw the story in six panels or less, no words or even letters allowed.
Here’s an example: “A businessman walks into a grocery store. The cashier waves hello. The man looks at the watermelons. A rhinoceros falls from the sky. The man puts it in his cart. He walks to the cashier and checks out.”
Here’s another: “A robot walks toward Big Ben. A person on a bicycle crashes into the robot. The robot’s head falls off. It rolls away. A football player picks up the robot’s head. He kicks it over Big Ben.”
Yet another: “A mom takes her three children with her to the hardware store. Two of the children have a sword fight with rakes. The third child gets on a riding lawn mower while no one’s looking and drives away. He leaves the store and drives onto the freeway. He drives to a speedway and enters the race. He wins the race on the lawn mower.”
And one more: “A king walks into a hamburger joint. He orders a king-size hamburger. The hamburger is delivered to the king. The king puts his crown on the cashier. The king puts the hamburger on his head. Mark Twain drinks a toast.”
The rest of the class then had to interpret and tell the story without any help from the artist. Only Scott knew the stories, which made the critique of each one immensely engaging and insightful. He was able to tease out the essential magic of comics. My story was the one about the robot (see page 88).
The magic and mystery of comics, we learned, is not necessarily contained in the images or anywhere within the panels. It does not live in what is drawn. Rather, it is the gutter—the white space between the frames—that holds the secret. There is nothing in the space between, yet it’s here where the real action occurs. It’s here that the reader is drawn in. It’s here that the reader is engaged, because it’s here that the story is left open to interpretation. It’s here that attention is focused, here that the imagination is sparked. And it’s here that the real story takes place.
“The gutter invokes closure,” Scott says. The gestalt principle of closure is something Scott spends a good bit of time on. He actually doesn’t like the term, because there’s too much pop psychology baggage around it. “I don’t like ‘gutter’ either,” he said to me during our interview. “I tried to change the language from panel and gutter to exposure and blink, but it didn’t stick. At all.”
Scott explains closure in terms everyone can understand. “At the heart of all comics is the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole, of mentally completing that which is incomplete, based on past experience. We don’t need every t crossed and i dotted. In our daily lives, closure allows us to make it through the day. I see the corner of a dollar bill peeking out of my wallet; I don’t need to see the whole thing to know it’s there. It’s automatic.”
In storytelling, though, it’s a deliberate invention meant to engage audiences, Scott says. “It can take many forms, some simple, some complex; sometimes just a mere shape or outline is enough to trigger it.” Scott draws a circle, then two smaller ones at ten o’clock and two o’clock. “What’s this?” he asks. Mickey Mouse, of course. Anyone can see that.
During our interview, I mentioned the work of Kevin Sprouls. “Definitely closure,” he says, nodding. “Our eyes take in the fragmented black and white of the patterns, and our brain transforms them into halftones, depth and dimension, and the reality of the face.”
But for Scott, the visual perception described by closure is only half the story; it’s the magic of the reader’s experience produced by the space between that fascinates him, as it does me. “Whatever the mysteries within each panel, it’s the power of closure between the panels that I find the most interesting. There’s something strange and wonderful that happens in this blankness.” He holds up his hands as if he’s holding something in each: “The human imagination takes these two separate images, right? And there’s not a single bit of information, not a single thing to see between them, but experience tells you something must be there and synthesizes something new, composes a single idea. Pure creativity; comics is closure!”
The closure in the comic medium is different from, say, the closure in film and television, which, like panels in a comic, goes frame by frame and moment by moment, but the increments and gaps are continuous and virtually imperceptible, thus largely involuntary. “Panels in comics fracture both time and space, offering a more jagged rhythm of unconnected moments,” says Scott. “But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct something unified and continuous. The difference is that the comic artist has a silent partner in crime: the reader. How you make the audience a willing and conscious collaborator, using closure as the agent of change, time, and motion—that’s the invisible art.”
One could even argue that the artist is innocent, simply the provocateur. “I can draw the raised axe, put a scream in the next frame,” Scott writes in Understanding Comics. “But I’m not the one who let it fall, decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That’s the special crime of the reader, each committing it in their own personal style. Each participated in the murder. Each held the axe and chose their spot. To kill a man between the panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths.”
In class, Scott discusses how participation is a powerful force in any medium. “Filmmakers realized that long ago,” he tells us. “Intervals, silences, unexplained moments, unvoiced thoughts; all these things allow the audience to participate, to have their own interpretation. There’s this silent agreement, a conspiracy, really, between the artists and their audience. Now, how any one artist honors that is a matter of craft.”
“You’ve got to let any story breathe,” Scott explained to me over lunch, weeks before the workshop. “It’s like inhaling every once in a while. If I’m trying to nail down every concept in a literal fashion, it just doesn’t breathe. You can easily suffocate your audience, drown them in a sea of too much information. You need those moments where the audience steps in. And it’s the spaces, the silences, that create that rhythm.”
At the mention of rhythm, I share with Scott my work with Toyota, my exposure to Japanese culture and the concept of ma. The discussion turns to differences in Eastern and Western storytelling. “Over there [in Japan] there’s such a long and rich tradition of space in all their various art forms. Their style is much more an art of intervals, more than anywhere, really. The idea that elements omitted from a work of art are as much a part of that work as those included, that’s been their specialty for literally hundreds of years. Here in the West, we don’t wander much. We’re so goal-oriented. Our bias for action is our thumbprint. In Japanese comics, you have that Zen thing happening. It’s more about being there versus getting there. The Japanese use a lot more genuine silence. Silent panels. You know what’s really funny? They have a sound effect for silence in comics. Maybe it’s such a part of their culture that they think they need to make it overt.”
I share with Scott my discussions with Lindon Leader, and he recognizes the name immediately. “In graphic arts you talk about negative space and figure—ground relationships.” He nods. “Using minimal elements to master your art is a noble aspiration in any medium.” When you listen to Scott talk, you realize he is a bit of a poet.
Back in class, Scotts uses the images on the next two pages, which he’s allowed me to share, to tell us exactly what I wanted to hear: “Visual storytelling is as subtractive an art as it is additive. And finding the balance between too much and too little is crucial. To strike the right balance you have to make assumptions about audience experience. Some artists blow it. They assume way too much. You still have to manage the closure between the panels. If you’re too ambiguous, too vague, there’s nothing for the audience to go on. You need the Goldilocks touch: just enough, just right, and just in time.”
Expanding on the concept of just in time, Scott uses the metaphor of a trapeze artist, where you offer up information to the reader and then release the reader into the open air of imagination, only to be caught in the nick of time by the outstretched arms of the next panel. “Caught quickly so as not to let the reader fall into confusion or boredom,” he says. “Or letting him free-fall without the wings to fly.” Poetry.
At the end of the first day, we gather in a circle for some open “wondering about” discussion.
One student asks if there’s a rule of thumb to help you manage your choices of moment. “If your reader is for some reason especially aware of the art in a given story,” Scott replies, “then you might be making them work too hard. But it’s also a matter of craft, style, and taste. The point is that all you can do is show the way. You can’t take people somewhere they don’t want to go. All you can do is make some good assumptions about the audience and hope you get them right. All you can do, really, is ask your audience for a little faith and a world of imagination.”
I ask how we might go about developing that sensitivity to know better how and where to let the audience in. “Trial and error,” answers Scott. “I wish I had a better or easier answer. You have to almost stand outside yourself. You have to become the audience, be the audience as you work. It’s not easy. You have to capture, or recapture, the joy of reading if you’re a writer, of viewing if you’re a painter, of driving if you’re designing cars. To put yourself in that state, to have that, I don’t know, amnesia, where you’re no longer a creator of the work, it’s just something that arrives on your desk—someone else did it, and you can gauge your own reactions to it objectively.”
As much for the other noncartoonist storytellers as for my own selfish purposes, I follow that up with a question about applying the concept of the gutter and audience participation in a nonliteral way to engage people’s imaginations, for example, in an organization. “Well,” Scott begins thoughtfully, “In organizations, leaders who are able to lead people to a conclusion without spelling it out are practicing something very much like that. If you think of the typical org chart where ideas flow from the top, that’s the more didactic conception. If you have instead an organizational structure where there’s inspiration that encourages the flow of ideas upward from the base, you might be looking at something more analogous to audience participation. More analogous to what we’re trying to create with comics.”
That seems to prompt another thought: “There’s a compelling theory in video gaming about the secret to games—that games are about the abdication of authorship. What makes it a game, whether it’s chess or Super Mario Bros. or Grand Theft Auto, is that the user feels as if they are the authors of their own experiences. There is a school of thought in gaming too of this notion of story and imposing stories upon games: with the story comes the author, and if there’s a tension because the creator is trying to impose a story on the user, you begin to lose some of the character of what makes games games in the first place. But when the user feels empowered to create their own experience, they don’t come away from the game talking about what someone made; they come away from that experience telling others ‘what I did.’ They’re the star of that story. And it is the understanding of the nature of gaming that allows the gamer to create something more pure. It’s that sense of user agency, that people create their own narratives. It’s much more natural, much more organic, much more like a game from when you were playing on the playground as a kid.”
What a great insight: the art of limiting information is really about letting people write their own story, which becomes much more engaging and powerful because they’ve invested their own intelligence and imagination and emotion.
“Look at Steve Jobs,” Scott continues. “We saw the greatest control freak of all times in Jobs. But what was he doing ultimately? He was creating nothing. Take the iPad as an example. It’s this empty vessel. It’s a window. He was creating the means by which users could feel as if they were at the console of the universe. You know? But all of that design work, all of that control; he wasn’t imposing control at all. He was handing the keys to us.”
That may be the best explanation of why limiting information matters that I’ve ever heard. As creators, our job is to design the vehicle that allows drivers to go anywhere they desire.
Our assignment for the next day was perhaps the best and most instructive exercise in the art of subtraction I’ve encountered. Scott handed us a tabloid-size sheet of sketch paper with 16 panels on it, as you can see on the next page. Our challenge was to draw the narrative of our lives using only 16 moments to capture the essence of our story—no words, only images.
I encourage you to try it. It is one of the hardest things you’ll ever attempt and one of the most subtractive. At the heart of the exercise are the three important decisions I introduced at the beginning of this book, and they are unavoidable in completing the exercise:
What to focus on and what to ignore
What to leave in and what to leave out
What to do and what to don’t
It also sets the stage for a discussion of the fourth law of subtraction.
DON NORMAN
HELEN WALTERS
LISA OCCHIPINTI
MARKUS FLANAGAN
CARMINE GALLO
SALLY HOGSHEAD
SHAWN PARR
JUSTIN BRADY
MARY POPPENDIECK
Our lives are complex. Our tasks are complex. Therefore, our tools must have a certain complexity to them. The question is, How should that be handled?
It’s amazing how many people give a talk and want to tell others everything they know about a topic. They prepare a slide and want to tell all the important information that’s on the slide. It becomes overwhelming.
When you’re listening to a talk, you keep in mind only one or two critical points. So any good talk should only make one or two critical points.
Slides should be incredibly simple: one point and ideally no words, just images. I actually argue with Edward Tufte [The Visual Display of Quantitative Information] about this. He’s very much against too little information on a slide. He doesn’t agree with providing supplemental information that’s not on the slide.
What I think Tufte misunderstands is the three different functions of a slide. One is to help the speaker. Many people need crutches to help remind themselves of what they want to say. If you need reminders, you should hide them from the audience. There’s no reason the audience needs to see your crutch.
Second, there’s what the audience sees on the slide. It should be simple, elegant, and easy to understand and shouldn’t take away from their ability to listen to the speaker at the same time.
Finally, there’s what they might want to take home and study later. And this is where Tufte is relevant. Tufte’s slides are really great if you want to take them home and pore over them for 20 minutes. In the context of a talk, though, you don’t have that 20 minutes to digest what you see and listen to the speaker at the same time.
Here’s a case where utter simplicity is important in one situation but not in the other. Simplicity is context-sensitive.
Read John Maeda’s book [The Laws of Simplicity]. It’s short and appears not to have much information. It appears simple, but it’s an incredibly complex book. John is a deep thinker and has this Zen master’s way of writing. His law about “Subtract the obvious, add the meaningful” might be the sound of one hand clapping unless you understand the nuance of it. It’s a simple statement but very deep. Subtraction is not just about what you want to take out or why; it’s how.
Subtraction requires nuance. If you can unpack the nuance, that’s a virtue—it’s what people miss in the quest for simplicity.
Don Norman (jnd.org) is a cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group and the author most recently of Living with Complexity.
The first time I saw Twitter being used in the wild was a strange experience. It was 2007. I sat next to a guy I knew in the auditorium of a conference and watched, confused, as he tapped into his laptop: “Sitting with Helen Walters from BusinessWeek.” Why is that interesting? I asked him. “It’s not, really,” he answered, shrugging. So I gave him what I hoped was my most withering look and then turned my attention to the stage to focus on writing and reporting in the traditional way I had long understood.
Since then I’ve come to appreciate the 140-character medium. Twitter seems to embody the essence of subtraction. The brevity forces you to focus on what’s truly important and to harness the restrictions as a challenge. The exercise of paring down meaning and insight into its purest form, formerly the purview of headline writers and the copy desk, is an invaluable one for anyone looking to communicate in the modern world. Such focused, clear thinking feeds back into the writing and thinking of a longer article, too.
In the years since I signed up for the service (in 2008, still reluctant, still grumpy, quickly addicted) I have marveled at the way in which this simple service has aided my writing, my thinking, my network, and my life. Many people seem to have constructed complex theories about the best ways to use it. My own philosophy aims to ape the simplicity of the service itself: don’t overthink things. I tune in when I can; I write what I think; I engage with those I feel are real; I don’t sweat the number of people following me; and I don’t talk about what I had for lunch unless it was genuinely remarkable.
As the years have passed, the service has created new relationships, strengthened old ones, given me space to think aloud and to ask for feedback or critique. (And boy, do people deliver.) I have watched breaking news stories unfold; I have cried over updates from people I’ve never met; I’ve been guided to stories I would never have seen; and I’ve been introduced to incredible people I’d never have known were it not for this powerful yet brilliantly simple form of expression.
I know that many people still don’t get Twitter, and there’s certainly still time for the company to take a wrong turn, to pollute its purity with some bad business decisions. But for me, as a writer, I’m hugely grateful for the focus and clarity Twitter has afforded my life. #Thanks.
Helen Walters (thoughtyoushouldseethis.com) is a writer, innovation consultant with Doblin, and a former editor of innovation and design at Bloomberg Businessweek.
One of the first things you learn when studying visual art is the concept of positive and negative space and that they are equally important. In the same way, subtraction holds equal weight with addition. By removing, you strengthen, because the other elements are allowed to become clearer while whatever is subtracted leaves an imprint. Subtraction is not a taking away so much as a refining.
For example, in some of my paintings I include drawing. I will begin with a turbulent ground of color and texture, lay the drawing in, and then paint out around the edges of that drawn shape to allow it to come forward. I am subtracting negative space. Because I have defined and refined the background area, the drawn subject can effortlessly emerge. Just as easily, I might have thickened or darkened the drawing’s outlines or filled it in with saturated color to make it more dominant, but the essence of that initial gesture of pencil to canvas would be lost, and so would its elegance.
Knowing what to leave out or take out is as crucial as knowing what to include. Subtraction is just as much an ingredient of constructing as addition is. When we begin a task, we naturally want the result to be perfect. This can lure us to include every morsel we think will produce an ideal outcome, but too often it is at the disservice of the larger intent and can detract from its dignity.
I think of subtraction as a recipe, and time is the oven temperature. Time clarifies by allowing the unessential to cook out so that you’re left with a rich reduction. When I’m cornered by an undertaking, I cede it to time to gain perspective. I walk away. When I return, I usually know what needs to be withdrawn in order to move forward. I am as objective as possible and courageous enough to admit that whatever this element is, it is not adding value to the greater good. This does not mean that it is not inherently valuable; it simply is ineffective in the current context.
Subtraction leaves things to the imagination and puts it in an active state, which is much more seductive and compelling than spelling it all out. There are times when I include images of people in my work, and I always remove or obscure faces because I want the viewers to see themselves or someone they know, not a particular given identity.
In this way they can emotionally connect to and personally participate in the work, which is the artist’s ultimate objective.
Sometimes you won’t know what to subtract until you have added. This process applies to all endeavors, not just creative ones. It is also, I find, a way of maneuvering through life.
Lisa Occhipinti (locchipinti.com) is an artist and the author of The Repurposed Library, featured in the New York Times. Her piece “Perfect Balance” appears on the next page.
Because we are in the business of make-believe, actors are highly prone to catastrophize. It’s not outrageous to think that you can be unknown today and a household name six months later. In an effort to exercise what small amount of control we have over our careers, actors fantasize the ups and downs of work and life with too many ifs:
“If I get this audition, and if I nail it and get the job, and if the director and the producers like what I do enough, I could become a series regular, and if the show runs ten seasons I’ll be a multimillionaire.”
And the reverse:
“If I don’t nail the audition, and if the casting director doesn’t like me, and if she tells the other casting directors in town how bad I did, I’m not getting called back and my agent will drop me, and if my agent drops me, I’m damaged goods and no one will sign me again. So if I don’t nail this audition, my career is over.”
We’ll do that even before we’ve read the audition material. We see the whole fantastic picture. Now, we are taught to see the dream, to visualize our success, right? We’re told we can mentally will our success to come true. Not totally bad advice, but this isn’t about dreaming; this is about keeping your psyche clear so your artistry can flourish. Ifs create expectations based in fear. Fear won’t make your acting better and can make it worse.
Actors get jobs by acting. I counsel actors to consider just the ifs that will lead to a better audition. Subtract as many ifs as it takes for you to get back to what you can truly influence and leave out the rest. That will settle your brain and prepare you to act:
“IF I go in and give myself over to the role, I’ll leave feeling like all the time and effort I’ve spent getting there has been well spent and I’ll have given myself a good shot at getting a job. IF they are looking for someone like me, I will have given them their best option, and I’ll leave knowing I did the best I could to better my career today. IF I don’t execute, I have to ask myself what stopped me.”
By subtracting ifs, you add the proper perspective and give yourself a shot at doing good work. Good work will become a job. That’s the most you should put on any one event. You act and you leave.
So IF you want to keep your sanity, subtract the ifs that had you either getting a star on Hollywood Boulevard or never working in this town again.
Markus Flanagan (onelessbitteractor.com) is a veteran actor, a coach, and the author of One Less Bitter Actor, with a vision that only art can save the world.
As a communications coach, I’ve learned that subtraction can mean the difference between a highly persuasive presentation and a long, convoluted, and confusing one. In my own experience I’ve noticed that speakers who deliver presentations with fewer words carry themselves better. They have leadership presence. They’ve internalized the story and are confident about their message. People who fill their slides with words and bullet points are often unsure of the material and speak with less passion and conviction.
The power of subtraction hit me when I watched Steve Jobs introduce the first MacBook Air in 2008. Most speakers would have created a slide filled with bullet points. All Jobs said was, “Today we’re introducing a computer that is so thin, it fits inside one of those interoffice envelopes you see floating around the workplace.” The slide he showed had no words, just a photo showing a hand pulling a MacBook Air out of a manila envelope. No words; the image said it all.
Why say more when you can say less?
I remember helping a large technology company with its annual investors meeting. I tried to persuade them to subtract words to make their presentations more effective. The room was filled with engineering types who would rather shrink the font to seven points than eliminate a word.
Finally, the company CEO stood up and told everyone to give it a try. The first slide had one simple sentence that summed up the company’s vision in just eight words. At the end of the presentation a consensus of analysts said it was the best investor update in the company’s 20-year history. When asked what they would remember most, several analysts quoted the first slide word for word. Subtraction actually made the remaining words on the screen more memorable.
Always ask yourself, How can I reduce the clutter? Steve Jobs once said the secret of innovation is to “say no to a thousand things.” I believe the same philosophy applies to the art of communication. By saying “no” more often, you’ll be more successful in getting your prospects to say “yes.”
Carmine Gallo (carminegallo.com) is the founder of Gallo Communications and the author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and The Apple Experience.
Every day, you’re in a battle for attention. Every day, you do battle against a thousand shiny objects to keep someone’s attention. Smartphones, tablets, laptops—powerful diversions full of noise with the potential to sabotage the very signal you’re sending.
If you can’t stand out, you can’t win. If you can’t stand out, don’t even bother playing. There are too many options, too many competitors willing to take your place. Today your success will depend on your ability to subtract the diversions.
In the battle for attention, you have a secret weapon: fascination.
Fascination is an intense emotional focus. When you fascinate people, they become completely focused on you. They stop focusing on all the shiny objects competing for their attention and focus completely on your message. The noise disappears, and they hear only your signal.
You can achieve this kind of intense emotional focus by understanding your natural ability to fascinate others. I can say this for a fact: you are fascinating.
But for you to eliminate diversions from the equation and create this intense focus, you must identify and apply your natural fascination. We each have a natural talent for attracting attention. It’s natural, so you don’t have to fake it or rehearse it—it’s already there, hardwired into your personality. You just have to identify it and use it.
Once you understand that unique strength, you can exploit it. Your listeners become more alert and focused, and your message is their priority. You become far more persuasive in communicating anything—selling life insurance to 20-year-olds becomes possible; inspiring a people during a round of layoffs becomes possible; convincing the gate agent to give you the last seat on the last flight out becomes possible.
Your goal is not to dazzle people with a variety of messages. No. Quite the opposite. Your goal is to pare down and attract their focus to just one thing: you.
So figure out what makes you fascinating, what makes you “you.” The world doesn’t need more messages. It needs more of you and less of the rest. It needs your secret best practices, your offbeat observations, your old-fashioned advice, and your cutting-edge solutions.
It’s not enough to communicate—you must also captivate. You must be the shiny object.
So subtract the noise and add the signal. Stand out or don’t bother.
Sally Hogshead (sallyhogshead.com) is the bestselling author of Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers for Persuasion and Captivation.
One of my favorite stories concerns the opening of a 30,000-square-foot Virgin store in a small British town the likes of which had never been seen in that community. The interior was beautiful and housed countless cool brands. On the day the store opened to the public, great bands played in the entrance, local celebrities were on hand, and the well-supported hometown football team was there in all its glory. The big publicity push was in full swing.
Opening day was a huge success and got significant press coverage. But the star attraction wasn’t the store or the celebrities; it was an old stone owl.
This little guy had stood on the top of the building for over a century and a half. Less than a foot tall, he’d scared countless flocks of pigeons away and in the process fulfilled his job of stopping them from tainting the Victorian facade of the building.
During the recent renovation, a workman had asked Virgin if they wanted to keep the owl. Of course they did. After all, the old bird had seen many store owners come and go during his unrelenting watch. Someone got the idea to build him a cool perch, suspending him over the store’s main stairway, giving him his own slightly tongue-in-cheek commemoration plaque as a small but unique local historical character.
All in all, to clean, mount, install, and brand the little owl, it cost about thirty pounds, versus the million or so invested in the store itself.
Not only did that thirty pounds give them some great local publicity coverage, it gave them an ongoing talking point. Despite the store being part of a large nationwide chain, the brand was recognized as being respectful of the city’s local history and for having a warm personality and a wry but fun sense of humor.
That little bird achieved what all the advertising, marketing, branding, promotion, and publicity efforts couldn’t: pulling people in.
When you look for genuine emotional connections to a community, create stories from the simplest things, look at the minutiae to differentiate yourself, and dare to be a bit silly. The littlest touches can pay the biggest dividends.
Shawn Parr (bulldogdrummond.com) is “the Guvner” of Bulldog Drummond, a design and innovation consultancy based in San Diego, California.
I was lucky. My very first project and client taught me a lesson about subtraction.
It was a small coffee shop owned by an Ethiopian woman in New Brighton, Minnesota, just on the edge of Minneapolis. She had hired me to design a logo for her shop. In the course of research I kept seeing the same coffee pot, called a jebena, typically used in the Ethiopian coffee ceremony. It was beautiful, and it became the visual anchor to celebrate this Ethiopian coffee shop.
I kept drawing the jebena over and over again. Somehow I wanted to combine the coffee bean and the jebena in the logo but didn’t want two visuals to compete or conflict with each other for space and attention. I kept drawing and drawing, not satisfied. Finally I just sort of stumbled on the idea of using the shape of the bean in negative space for the handle opening of the jebena. Now that’s probably an eye roller for most designers, but for me, just starting out, it was a little eureka moment.
The ability to edit is critical for a designer. If there’s anything visually present that doesn’t assist in sending the message directly or emotionally, it’s a distraction and will work against the design. Achieving simplicity by removing distraction is always the goal, but it’s a discipline, and if I’m not diligent, I can succumb to excess.
Recently, I was working on a project for a family farm in Iowa. On all their packaging we thought it would be visually appealing to have their logo appear as though it were stamped on.
I started thinking about how cool it would be if each stamp was printed to look hand stamped. I’d need about ten different effects, I figured, to do a custom package printing. It was sophisticated and expensive. In fact, it was prohibitive for the family farm.
I was desperate to salvage the project. I went back through my notes, and when I did, the most elegant solution of them all hit me like a slap to the forehead: an actual stamp! The farm already had to handle all the meat individually before giving it to customers, so hand stamping each package would be a breeze.
I passed this solution on to them, and they loved the idea. They loved that it didn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars—more like fifty bucks—and that it was so simple.
In design, as in most things, fighting excess is a constant battle.
Justin Brady (testoftimedesign.com) is the founder of Test of Time Design, a design consultancy based in Des Moines, Iowa.
When Mark Parker became CEO of Nike, Steve Jobs called to congratulate him. Parker asked Jobs if he had any advice, and at first the answer was no, but then Jobs said, “Well, I do have some advice. Nike makes some of the best products in the world—products that you lust after, absolutely beautiful, stunning products. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.” Parker later said, “I expected a little laugh, but there was a pause and no laugh at the end.”
I had the same experience when I wrote my first book. It took me about six months to write the first draft. I submitted it to the editor, who sent it out to reviewers, and in a few weeks I had a rather unanimous verdict: there was some good stuff but a lot of crap. It was a random collection of articles, not a book. When I reread the book from the distance of a few months, I had to agree. It lacked a theme, a structure, and flow.
I reorganized the material and threw out more than half of what I had written. I had a new set of criteria: I imagined that two managers I had worked with recently were reading every paragraph. I focused on whether they were getting bored. Now these managers were rather impatient, so I figured they were easily bored. And if I thought they were getting bored, the paragraph was discarded. I didn’t need it. I needed a more concise and effective way to get my point across. Or maybe the point was not that important in the first place.
I had three simple rules for that book: first, my readers would not, could not get bored; second, the content had to flow seamlessly from one section to the next, without expecting my reader to jump around; and third, there would be no duplication. I pretended that I was the reader and demanded that I didn’t waste my time with extra words, extra ideas, scattered content, or duplication.
My lesson in all of this: attention is a scarce commodity. Make sure you don’t squander it. Spend time deciding what you will not do so that you can focus on the good stuff.
Mary Poppendieck (poppendieck.com) with her husband, Tom, is a cofounder of Poppendieck.LLC and the coauthor most recently of Leading Lean Software Development.
