The impact of technological development

Technological development has transformed the design and creation of printed artefacts. This is not an understatement, considering the changes that have taken place in the production of the tourist brochures between 1967 and 2008. In this section, I highlight some aspects of producing print media artefacts that have been somewhat neglected up to this point. For example, Hendel (1998, p. 5) emphasises the role of technological development in book design:

What once took hours and days can now be done in minutes ... I used to spend hours, even days, drawing out a title page. I was consummately proud of my skill at rendering letters. Now the computer has made all of this unnecessary. No longer dependent on my ability to draw letters, I can see precisely what the letters look like and can control every detail of their final placement.

Most importantly, technological development has brought about a number of tools to assist the production. To refer back to the model of change shown in Figure 3.1, the available tools and technology also shape the structure of a multimodal artefact, as they affect the process of creating the artefact. For example, the cutting and pasting of text and images on millimetre paper has been replaced by desktop publishing (DTP). In DTP, the same process happens without the need for a material substrate, as the design process takes place in a digital environment and the end product of the process can be sent directly to the press. What this opens is the possibility of increased experimentation in design, the impact of which I shall describe below.

However, a discussion of the current production methods and tools should be preceded by a look into the past. Previously, graphic design did not only require the skill of visual composition, but also the art and craft of making things by hand.

This process involved the careful positioning text and images on millimetre paper to prepare a plate, which could be then used to produce a print run in the press.

Let us now look at two specific examples selected from the annotated corpus to illustrate the design process in the past.

The first example, shown in Figure 6.5a, is from a series namedHelsinki’s Four Tourist Islands, first published in 1967. The example shows a part of a map, which helps the reader to travel to the “tourist islands”. In this case, the point of interest is how the map and the accompanying graphic elements are put together. The map, upon which the graphic elements are imposed, is a nautical map intended for navigation! On the map, the transparent blue lines indicate the ferry routes. The

(a) Map inHFT 1967 (b) Text inSMH 1982 Figure 6.5: Two examples of technological development

destinations, in turn, are marked by the round, coloured symbols. These symbols also reappear close to the destination descriptions elsewhere in the brochure — I will explain their function shortly below.

Given the tools available in 1967, the design solution in Figure 6.5a is simple yet effective. At the same time, it is important to understand that each element

— the map, the blue lines, the symbols — had to be separately manufactured and put together in the final design. Moreover, any experimentation with different designs would have warranted the same process. For this reason, graphic design remained a very concrete process until the invention of DTP.

To illustrate the changes resulting from the invention of DTP, we can trace the realisation of the same map in the Helsinki’s Four Tourist Islands series in the examples shown in Figure 6.6. As Figure 6.6a shows, the same technique from 1967 was still used in 1972 (cf. Figure 6.5a). Fast-forward twelve years; the map in Figure 6.6b has undergone significant changes, plausibly due to the introduction of DTP. Firstly, the nautical map has been replaced with a map of the coastline and only major neighbourhoods are named on the map. Considering the map cannot be used for orientation — and certainly not for navigation — it was likely created for the brochure in question.

Four years later in 1988, the realisation of the map has changed again (see Fig-ure 6.6c). In particular, the destination names are now accompanied by coloFig-ured boxes, which also appear elsewhere close to the header of the respective sections of the brochure. This is a kind of implicit navigation structure designed to help in the use of the brochure (Hiippala 2012b, p. 1505). In addition, the shape of both the end point and the line have changed. Unfortunately, the series was apparently discontinued after the year 1988, so further examples could not be found. In any

(a) 1972 (b) 1984 (c) 1988 Figure 6.6: Maps inHelsinki’s Four Tourist Islands

case, the introduction of DTP appeared to foster experimentation with designs and visual appearance at least in this series.

Let us now return to the other example given in Figure 6.5b. This brochure, Sculptures and Monuments in Helsinki (1982), is an interesting example in the annotated corpus: it is the only brochure that was not typeset. Instead, the brochure was written with a typewriter. As a result, the variation in typography is limited to small and capital letters, and possibly to underlined text. The chosen production method is therefore very limited in terms of typography, especially if contrasted with today’s possibilities. What I wish to emphasise here is how far the design of multimodal artefacts has advanced: many of the technical constraints in production have largely disappeared.

However, the major implication of the discussion above is the following: a multimodal analyst is only provided with the end product of the design process.

The analyst cannot see the various iterations of the design process; nor the analyst cannot know if the end product was created by multiple authors (cf. E. et al.

2011). Today, a copywriter and an art director are likely to share the work — not to mention other supporting roles that may be involved in the process, such as project managers, editors and DTP operators. In future, it is possible that joint work with ethnographic methods may be used to investigate the design processes as they unfold (see e.g. Kress 2011). At the time, what can be said with relative certainty is that the principles of the design process have changed.

In conclusion, it may be suggested that the need for a material substrate to realise a design encouraged a careful and considerate approach to the process

of graphic design in the past. In contrast, the possibility of instant feedback and redesign — enabled by DTP — may have fundamentally changed the craft.

To the multimodal analyst, the important question is whether this possibility to experiment and redesign has lead to changes in the brochures. It should also be noted that reworking the visual appearance of a brochure may also involve altering its multimodal structure in terms of the layout structure and the rhetorical structure: I shall follow up on this issue in Section 8.5.

6.4 Summary

In this chapter, I have laid out the groundwork for the further analysis of the tourist brochure as a multimodal artefact. Addressing the characteristics of the brochure as a medium is essential in preparation for the analysis of multimodal structure in the subsequent chapters. The capabilities and characteristics of the selected medium — the brochure — are necessary for distinguishing and identifying clearly the various contributions to the multimodal structure of the brochures. I will now summarise the three issues discussed in this chapter.

To begin with, Section 6.1 explored the characteristics of the brochure as a medium, which carries the genre of the tourist brochure. After establishing the necessary theoretical prerequisites, I studied certain features of the medium, such as the method of binding and the fold geometry, in order to establish how the brochures exploit the material substrate of a printed page to create space for their content. The analysis established that staple-bound brochures have a higher page count (mean = 24.6), whereas in the folded leaflets without staples the number of pages is lower (mean = 6.8). I concluded that these general observations may have implications for the subsequent multimodal analysis, if differences are found between the structures of brochures and leaflets (see Section 8.5).

In Section 6.2, I addressed the issue of advertising in the tourist brochures. Al-though the tourist brochures themselves constitute a form of advertising, a number of brochures (n = 6) also contained classified advertisements. This development appeared only after the year 2000 in staple-bound brochures with a high number of content pages. Furthermore, the classified advertisements also expanded the func-tionality of the tourist brochure as an artefact, because the brochure could be used to redeem discounts at the locations promoted in the classified advertisements. To conclude, I also argued that advertising should be considered a medium-based phenomenon in the process of modelling the structure of a multimodal artefact.

This means that the analysis of the advertisements’ structure should not be incor-porated into that of the tourist brochures as a genre, because the genre and the advertisements do different kinds of communicative work.

The concluding Section 6.3 considered two aspects of production related to the tourist brochures. I first questioned the much-discussed ‘visual turn’ in com-munication and evaluated the proposal by drawing on the annotated corpus: for each double-page, I calculated the number of visual base units and the amount of layout space they occupy. The analysis showed the tourist brochures have been fairly visual between 1967 and 2008, with the average percentage of layout space dedicated to graphic elements exceeding over 50%. It appears that the medium of a brochure affords a high degree of visuality, but the annotated corpus showed that the pages take many forms: some are purely linguistic, some are mainly visual, and some are in between. In addition, I discussed and exemplified the impact of technological development on the tourist brochures. In preparation for the struc-tural analysis, I asked whether desktop publishing has fostered experimentation that resulted in visible changes in the multimodal structure of the brochures. This observation added another point of focus for the subsequent analysis.

With the three points described above in mind, the following chapter continues with an in-depth analysis of the brochures and their structure on the basis of the annotated corpus.

Chapter 7