Activity: Power of Captions

Our second group activity is the exercise suggested by Austin Kleon’s “The Power of Captions: Words Added to Pictures”. Following Kleon’s analysis and examples, you’ll work in groups to create different gags, stories, or messages from the same image.

Among other things, we’ll use this caption-writing activity for some preliminary practice with Photoshop and Comic Life.

Working in groups of 3-4, complete the following series of steps.

1. Find/produce a mix of wordless images. There should be at least six of these. Half need to be drawn (by you or found online) or clip art; half should be photographs.
2. Save the images to the local desktop and open them in Photoshop.
3. Move one table over clockwise.
4. Select 3-4 images from the selection open in Photoshop. Choose at least one drawing or piece of clip art and one photograph.
5. For each image, come up with two VERY different captions or labels that (optimally) change how we would see these images in two very different, even opposing ways. Use Kleon’s blog article as a your paradigm.
6. Duplicate the image as demonstrated by the instructor.
7. Then use the Photoshop type tool (or Comic Life) to add your conflicting captions to each image-pair.
8. Re-save the images, and upload them to one (or more) of your Scribd accounts. Then email he instructor links to these online versions

Indexed by Jessica Hagy at VizThink ‘09

This is a great little presentation by Jessica Hagy (indexed) on the importance of captions:

So much of the visual thinking world…is all about “Let’s simplify it! Let’s make it so transparent and obvious that we won’t have to write up a giant memo, we’ll just draw a picture, it’ll be super,” and that’s it. But the fact is, the more simple the image is, the more ways there are to interpret it. It’s a Rorschach test for whoever’s looking at it. Even when you go to a Flickr site and you look at people’s images, you’re kind of like, “Wow, that’s a really interesting image, but what is it?” And those captions almost tell more of a story than the picture does.

Spoken like a true copywriter!

She also goes on to talk about stock photos, and how stock photos can be used to sell anything:

Well worth checking out, as Hagy is right: a good portion of the VizThink community is all about “if only we find the perfect, simple image, all communication problems will be solved!” Should stir up some folks.

(PS. Until the end, I didn’t realize that Tom asked a question by me.)

A client wanted more photos on a website and she wanted them to rotate randomly on every page.

I explained to her that if you put a picture on a webpage, you want the picture to some way strengthen, expand, or comment on the webpage as a whole, and the only way to do this was with a caption that is not just descriptive, but also illuminates the significance of the picture. If you have a bunch of pictures randomly rotating on a page, it says nothing — it’s just ornamentation/decoration.

Of course, ornamentation is what most clients want. More graphics. More colors. “Make it pretty.” Make it bigger…

…which is when you hand them some MAKE MY LOGO BIGGER cream.

Chris: Thanks for the kind words!