Interview: Stefanie Posavec, beautifier of literature

This is the second post in an ongoing series of interviews with ‘interesting’ people that the Made by Many crew find either inspiring, exciting, confusing or otherwise of note.

Stefanie Posavec is a designer, artist and data visualiser. Her site at www.itsbeenreal.co.uk is a veritable feast of lovely interestingness. If you had to sum her up, it might be beautifier of literature as this is a key focus of both her ‘real’ job and some of her data projects (which includevisualisations of things like Kerouac’s On The Road and OK Go’s latest album cover)

Sit back and enjoy an intimate (email) interview with Stefanie:

MxM: You create an eclectic range of design work and projects. Is there a common thread or inspiration for your work?MxM: You create an eclectic range of design work and projects. Is there a common thread or inspiration for your work?

The underlying connection in most of my work is the act of notating, or representing different concepts in a visual way. I like working with quantities, complexity, and language.

MxM: You developed a stunning way to visualise the written word (‘Writing Without Words’). Can you tell us how that project came about and how you developed the approach?

‘Writing Without Words‘ was the project completed for my final year on the MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. The intention of this body of work was – as described in the project’s title – to explore various methods of visualising literature without using words.

I wanted to find a way of communicating the complexities found in literature and highlighting the similarities and differences in the writing styles of various authors.The structure of a novel and its punctuation, parts of speech, and words per sentence were used to generate the final complex patterns. Any piece of literature can be visualised using these approaches, but the focus of the project was the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, because of its importance to me while I was growing up in Denver, Colorado – a key city within the novel.

For this project I gathered all of the data by hand, counting words and sentences, and carefully dividing a battered copy of On the Road into key themes (such as Women, Parties, Sketches of Regional Life, and so on) using markers and highlighters.

I was able to reduce the entire novel into a stack of paper filled with lists of numbers. I found this process of compression incredibly satisfying. Using these numbers, I created the graphics by hand in Adobe Illustrator instead of using a specific program to generate the visuals.

Finally, the whole aesthetic of the series of posters and books was based around the time period when On the Road was written. I selected typography that referenced typefaces in use at the time, and I chose the colours used to represent key themes within the novel from 1940s vintage car paint swatches.

MxM: You’ve used similar designs with OK Go Album art. Can you tell us a little about this?

OK Go is an American band that’s brilliant at combining its music with great visual concepts and great designers. [Ed: Not to mention AMAZING music videos]I was really excited when when Damian Kulash Jr., the band’s lead singer, asked me and Greg McInerny, my collaborator on this project, to work with them and visualise the song lyrics for the upcoming album as well as text from the album’s namesake, the book The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky by General A.J. Pleasonton.

In this book, Pleasonton promotes his (completely wrong) theory about the wondrous healing and strengthening properties of blue or violet light, and the band felt that themes in this book were similar to themes found in the lyrics of their songs. The visuals were created through the analysis of themes, grammatical parts of speech, word syllable analysis, sentence length, and words common to both the lyrics and the book. I gathered some of the data by hand and some was gathered using programmes created by Greg, who is an ecologist at Microsoft Research.

For the album cover Damian analysed the text and lyrics according to a set of key themes that were important to him (travelling from city to city while on tour). To produce the visuals, I would come up with visualisation ideas in Adobe Illustrator and then Greg would create the final images using real data and then further refine the visuals, so it was quite a collaborative process.

[You can see more of the album artwork at Stefanie's site]

MxM: What tools/software do you use to produce data visualisations?

Pens and highlighters to gather data, standard graphic design programs, and I have relied on Greg to provide coding in Processing and the statistical programming language R for recent projects.

MxM: How long do your projects take and how do you choose the data types to visualise?

Projects like this always take longer than a normal illustration because this involves deciding what data to map, gathering the data, deciding to how to visually represent the data, and then finally rendering the data as form. All in all, it’s a long time! They take a few months to finish when interspersed with day jobs and other projects.

MxM: What inspired you to collaborate with David McCandless on the ‘Left v Right’ visualization and how did you adjust your approach?

David McCandless approached me to collaborate with him on a spread for his book Information is Beautiful. David did the research and I created the visuals. Representing politics is different from representing text, so my goal in creating this visual was to create something pleasing to the eye that would catch the attention of someone who might not necessarily be interested in politics. Yes, it might not be in the minimal, clean style that is so often upheld as essential to information design, but I don’t think that this image would have been so heavily circulated around the internet if it had been designed in this manner.

MxM: Which data visualization artists do you like? Where is your future going?

I like Martin Wattenberg for his project The Shape of Song, which was an inspiration — both for its simplicity its and beauty — when I was studying. I also love Karsten Schmidt’s work. For the future, I am interested in pursuing projects that explore the future of the book and its shift from print to on-screen.

MxM: Your ‘day job’ is as a book cover designer. How do you approach this type of work and how does it differ from your more personal projects?

At Penguin, I create covers for the imprint Penguin Press, which publishes non-fiction (Allen Lane) and the classics. Both designing book covers and producing my personal work begins with reading some or all of the text. Also, for both types of project, I try to find something I love in the text to help me represent it in the most successful way possible. However, designing a book cover is a commercial endeavour, where the aim is to design a cover that appeals to a specific type of reader and compels them to buy the book. In my personal work, although I am still trying to communicate a message to people, that message is often more personal and more subjective. Even when producing this type of work for a commercial project (like OK Go), the point of this work is less about selling a product and more about creating a feeling or experience.

MxM: How do you think the advent of e-books will affect/is affecting your work?

I think the advent of e-books will possibly put my ‘day job’ in jeopardy while at the same time provide a great opportunity to move forward with my ‘night job’. I find the possiblities of the e-book exciting, as it has the potential to change people’s perception of language and literature: literature need not only be represented as lines on a page in a book, but can be represented in new ways in order to bring new insights to the text.

E-books could allow for more experimentation with how we experience a text, and I hope that publishers are open to exploring the capabilities in this area. However, having said that, there is still a place for beautifully-designed books, and considering how there is a rise in projects these days involve taking electronic text from the internet and translating it into print form (like here: http://www.reallyinterestinggroup.com/tofhwoti.html), I don’t think people will be giving up their printed matter just yet.

MxM: Any other projects on the horizon!?

I have a couple in my head that are planned for this year, though I still need to get around to them (excuses, excuses!). I’m not quite finished exploring the English language just yet, so I will be focusing on this in the future, and on any interesting collaborations anyone sends my way.

MxM: OK, time for some slightly fun/random questions:

Where are you now and what time is it?
4 pm on a Sunday, at home in my flat, sitting on my couch with my laptop.

Kindle vs ipad vs book?
Book (for now).

Google does do some evil and Apple is the new Microsoft. Agree or disagree?
I probably agree, even though I use their products daily! How can something so wrong feel so right?

Facts, fantasy, self-truth or the unbelievable?
How about using facts to create the unbelievable?

If there was one visual ‘thing’ (art or photo or a visualisation or something else you’ve come across) that you could get the entire world to see, what would it be?
I would show every person an image of a human rights violation their country has taken part in — like showing the Mai Lai ‘And babies?’poster [warning graphic image] to the US. I know that comes to more than one visual ‘thing’ but I think that when people are confronted with some low points of their culture it would hopefully make them less inclined to be judgemental towards other cultures.

You have to design the front cover of your autobiography. What do you do!?
Design a cover with all the most expensive finishes possible. Considering how cost is always a factor when producing a book design, having no boundaries around the printing and finishing of my autobiographical cover would be bliss.

Thanks Stefanie! See more of her work online.