Amplification Through Simplification

I was recommended Understanding Comics by my boss, and truly, it is a good read. It is pretty unusual in actually reading a comic book about comics. But what's more interesting is that the book is really on quite a serious discussion of what comics are about and how they work. It's also quite a treatise on how design in general works, and how the human mind processes it.

I find it quite clever, choosing the medium of comics to present the content of a formal book. As they say, a picture paints a thousand words. But in this case, it helps to greatly summarize what the author is trying to say, without having to go through the linguistic gymnastics in order to precisely explain concepts and their nuances. Anyone who's written documents for others would know how hard that can be, without using images.

I especially liked the suggestion that comics worked through amplification through simplification. Design in general does do something of the sort. By cutting out the noise in the message, the key features left emphasized are the ones that the audience will tend to notice first. Which is why most photographs need to have a very prominent subject matter, so that the correct feature of the photo is presented to the audience.

I have not finished reading the book just yet, but overall, I do think it will be quite an enjoyable read.