# Visualizing Ponge *03-24-25* Concepting and coming up with a visualization was a back and forth for the better part of a couple weeks— we had come to a general consensus on the theme and motifs we saw within “The End of Autumn”, now was figuring out how to visualize it. We each individually did our own versions to meet together and essentially did a group crit and workshopped a final as a group. Pictured below is what each member came to the meeting with. ## My work When I was trying to do research on how to set the work on my part, I encountered the following quote from an article from DIELINE’s newsletter: > “_How would you say these words out loud if you were rehearsing to be cast in a play that you wanted really, really, bad? How would you intonate them? Where would your emphasis be? Do it alone in your house, and take note of how your tone changes and that is where the visual hierarchy is._“ I decided that my contribution would be focused on the typesetting and for that, I didn’t research or look at anything, I just focused on how I could best represent the themes that we had established with only type. My process in this was a combination of digitizing the type from my sketches and figuring out how to replicate the Ponge’s story beats using only type. **below**: In this digitization, I was thinking about how the chaos would affect the spreads surrounding it so that the reader would be introduced to the chaos before actually seeing it. ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742874175481.webp]] ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742874214715.webp]] **below**: Beginning and end parallels to reinforce the concept of the cycle. ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742874413395.webp]] ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742874410221.webp]] **below**: Final typesetting (click to zoom) ![[03.23.25 calcifer_1.webp]] ![[03.23.25 calcifer_2.webp]] ## Group’s work > [!img]- Emily’s work > > ![[03.23.25 Emily_1.webp]] > (click to zoom) > > I appreciated the effort Emily put into connecting the different spreads, however, I felt as though her imagery was disconnected from each other. I could see a bit of her thinking, but my concern that the connections that I was making were from my familiarity with the text and an initial reader would not be able to make the same connections that we had. > [!img]- Adair’s work > > ![[03.23.25 adair_1.webp]] > > ![[03.23.25 adair_2.webp]] > > Even though his spreads were incomplete, I personally felt Adair’s were the strongest out of the group. There was a consistent visual style and I could strongly see the themes and motifs that we had previously talked about as group. The typography felt in tune with his imagery, but some of the images felt out of place and not entirely connected to the set as a whole. > > ![[adairsnapshot.webp]] > His first panel was what really struck me, there was something extremely interesting about the photo editing on the branch image that I felt connected with our visual theme. > [!img]- Angel’s work > > ![[3.23.25 angel_1.webp]] > > ![[3.23.25 angel_2.webp]] > > Angel’s work borrowed pretty heavily from the discussions of office themes that we had come up with in the sketching phase. There was a heavy tea theme going on and what I didn’t realize was the inkblot shapes in the background was supposed to be diffusing as the reader flips through. > I felt that this was weak as I didn’t even recognize that design choice until I was told and additionally, the tea theme had little relevance to the rest of her visuals. > [!img]- Seadra’s work > ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742854002846.webp]] > ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742854020541.webp]] > ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742854056886.webp]] > ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742854078424.webp]] > ## Deciding to pivot It was after seeing this that I realized that our initial direction wasn’t going to work: those who had chosen to expand on the office theme had series that felt disconnected from each page. As a group, we took notes on what we appreciated from each and began concepting what a new final would look like. ![[calcifer_notes.webp]] ![[emily_notes.webp]] ### Collaboration process The most important part of the poem to us was the feeling of a cycle, so the branches were a natural start. ![[Visualizing Ponge-1742877646355.webp]] We got stuck trying to figure out the transition between these two passages: > Sorting the ballots is a disorderly procedure. All the doors of the polling place slam open and shut. Throw it out! Throw it all out! > Nature rips up her manuscripts, demolishes her bookshelves, furiously clubs down her last fruit. > Then she abruptly gets up from her work table. She suddenly seems immense: hatless, head in the fog. Swinging her arms, she rapturously breathes in the icy, intellectually clarifying wind. Days are short, night falls fast; there's no time for comedy. <br> Conversation started flowing after I suggested using this image to represent the female character in the latter stanza. ![[blog_visualizing ponge-1742943605487.webp]] As a group, we collected photography to establish a visual theme for our final product. - ![[stockphoto1.webp]] - - Examples of some imagery that I did not feel would work, too “stock-image-like.” - ![[stockphoto2.webp]] You can see a full collection of our images [[resource_images | here]]. Eventually, we began to think of visualizing the poem using abstract imagery, placing emphasis on the type used, a concept inspired by Rosemarie Tissi’s work. ![[blog_visualizing ponge-1742943772415.webp]] ![[blog_visualizing ponge-1742948848319.webp]] For color, we decided on a greyscale palette to mimic the detached interpretation we had of the poem. This started with using the same editing that Adair did for his design but we quickly found that the process didn’t work with all of our [[resource_selectedimages | selected images]]. ![[resource_images-1742949106441.webp]] ![[blog_visualizing ponge-1742949027118.webp]] In the end, we only used a couple of Adair’s edited images, the rest were done by me photographing black and white printouts of the images. Since I also did the typesetting, I was the one who put together the final product. ![[blog_visualizing ponge-1742949552579.webp]] ![[blog_visualizing ponge-1742949560445.webp]]