PhD: Visual genres in newspapers
By genres I am referring to categories such as “broadsheets” and “tabloids” or “quality papers” and “popular press”. The power of these is clear. If you walk into a café or a coffee room at the office and you see papers from the two categories on the table, you can usually immediately tell which paper belongs to which genre. This often happens before you recognise what paper it is and before you read any of the headlines. What you are “reading” about the paper are the other physical and visual cues.
Papers from different genres tell the stories differently. So it’s not just about putting the information into a new visual format. But you could do that. That is why I’m comparing the visual language metaphorically to theatre sets. The sets define the mood and epoch of the play while the text might be exactly the same Romeo & Juliet you’ve seen dozens of times.
Linguists and journalists have done research on how language and grammar operates. We know how the mood and feeling of a sentence changes if we switch individual words etc. But for some reason, no one has really figured out how visual language language works. Designers create different moods intuitively but do not really understand the precise mechanics of what they are doing. There has been some research done but we are still far away from understanding it all.
General research interests
Most of my work is quite interdisciplinary. Still there is a red line that runs through it all. I suppose the easiest definition is that I’m interested in communication and especially visual communication. But I’d rather not let that term dictate what I’m doing.
Because communication – even if you just narrow it down to visual communication – is such a complex issue, one must try to encompass related areas too. Psychology, biology, aesthetics, philosophy etc. But if I must, I can try to fit my interests under four topics:
Visual communication
After all our theories, how information is communicated is still an intriguing question. As my professional background is in newspapers, my work is often connected to issues in journalistic communication.
My interest is slightly more in how communication functions socially and not in the technical side. But these two are usually more or less inseparable. The technical communication theories don’t satisfy me. But then again the purely social semiotic models don’t feel right either. Both sides seem to be too radical. The truth probably lies somewhere in-between them.
Information design
Instead of just concentrating on one field of design, for example graphic design, it is often much more interesting and fruitful to approach the task from the point of view of information design. Here the main question is that how to communicate as effectively as possible. Only after this is settled, we can choose the right medium for the task.
Typography
Typography is over 500 years old, but the field of typographic research is not very developed. It is an interesting field connected to other areas of design research, aesthetics, and our everyday life.
Theory & history
I am deeply moved by theoretical questions of communication and design. They are always present even in the work of a regular designer but I want to go further. I am not interested in whether the theory has something to offer for the practical work. The theories can be important themselves. Without history the understanding of today’s design and theoretical movements would be impossible.
