On Denotative and Connotative Layers:
Take a picture to document your home. Pay no particular attention to the composition of the photograph or the use of line or value.
Maybe you end up with an image like this one. The home has off-white siding. The door is a dark green. Grain is visible in the photograph, implying perhaps that the photo was taken on film. There is repetitive use of line throughout the image: note the horizontal siding and vertical slats on the porch railing.
Show this picture to three different people. If you asked them to describe the objective design elements of the image, they may name some of the qualities I’ve listed or others. If you ask them how they feel about the image, however, you’ll receive entirely different narratives. Some may say the home feels warm; they could picture playing catch in the front yard. Others might say it looks cold or unpleasant based on their personal associations with a house that looks similar. If you ask me, the photographer, I know that this image captures the first childhood home I remember: a duplex in western Michigan. On the right day, this everyday picture can make me cry.
There is no such thing as an objective image. Scholars Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright explore this in the first chapter of their book Practices of Looking. All visuals are both denotative and connotative. We can explain an image’s denotative qualities through the elements of design. In order to understand the connotations of an image, we must invest in a wider anthropological lens of identity, culture, and psychology.
All images are layered, both metaphorically and literally. Over the past several weeks in Visual Thinking and Web Design, we’ve explored Adobe Photoshop, a software which empowers designers to manipulate both the denotative and connotative layers of design. As a communications professional who has used Photoshop regularly since 2016, these projects were a chance to really dig into my personal creative vision, rather than the desired outcomes of an organization or client.
The first class prompt involving Photoshop was a transformation of Jacob Lawrence’s collage “Munich Olympic Games, 1972.” For folks new to the software, collage is a great introduction. In an era of digital images, it’s easy for non-designers to think of graphics as static. Collage, however, is an accessible medium that physically captures the digital functionality of Photoshop.
Though the software offers many tools, Photoshop’s core organizational system is composed of layers. When you start a new project, you are prompted to specify your desired dimensions, DPI, and other file settings. After selecting these features, a white canvas appears, which one can think of as their base layer. In the case of a physical collage, this background layer is the piece of paper that will hold the artist’s work.
Then, the user has the ability to create new layers. You could do this by inserting images, drawing, making shapes, or a host of other options. Every new addition to the document becomes a new layer. You can manipulate the order in which layers appear, merge them together, or delete them in your right side menu. Each layer is like a new scrap in a collage; you might move them around, lay them on top of each other, or glue them together.
Layers are essential in Photoshop (and other Adobe softwares) as they allow you to isolate and manipulate every aspect of a graphic design. When, for instance, I design a brochure for work, having each part of my project in a different layer empowers me to efficiently play with different colorways, compositions, and more. Layers are such a crucial functionality of design software that even more accessible platforms like Canva are implementing the system. Canva has also administered Adobe’s feature of exporting a design file in multiple formats. In the case of Photoshop, you can save your design as a Photoshop file (.psd) to retain full software functionality, a JPEG or PNG file to obtain a static image, a gif to obtain a short, looping animation, and others.
So back to Jacob Lawrence. You saw his original collage earlier in this post, so let’s turn our attention to my transformation. I themed my work around brands and capitalism, imagining that the athletes are (impossibly) trying to outrun our predatory economic system. I replaced each of the core colors from Lawrence’s original piece with a brand marked by a related color scheme.
Having explored the functionality of Photoshop through our first project, we then moved on to creating a Carte de Visite.
This modernized interpretation of a calling card was intended to capture students and our priorities through strategic visual composition. Take a look at the front of my card.
First, let’s identify the elements. The image is set in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art where Rene Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images” is on display. The wall, however, has been replaced by a series of poems and science textbook pages. On top of the artwork is an illustration of a fish with a human’s body, which is part of a personal visual art project.
An oversized pencil covers the floorboards and leaves a mark on the wall. I am in frame looking up toward the fish illustration, and my wedding ring crowns my head. A soft rainbow illuminates my face, cast down through the ring.
The first thing I determined when crafting this composition was that I wanted the walls to be covered in poems and textbook drawings. I live my life as a poet and illustrator, and so it feels as though the walls of my brain are covered in diagrams and verse. Thus, I wanted these inspirations to be the literal and metaphorical backdrop of this representation of me. The pencil is oversized and toward the bottom of the frame as writing and sketching are foundational practices of my life. My wedding ring functions as a sort of halo; I regard my marriage as a spiritual practice that guides all my decision making. Given my decision to place my portrait in line with the Magritte work, the viewer’s focus is split between my face and the art. This challenging focal point was purposeful, as it reflects my investment in sharing artwork that is meaningful to me with just about anyone who will listen. The composition is light, hopeful, and whimsical.
We were also tasked with creating the back of the Carte de Visite: a typographic piece containing text of our choosing. I chose to capture a poem I wrote recently before my 30th birthday. I used my knowledge of the elements and principles of design in this production as well. I manipulated the shape and line of the text to evoke different visuals. The phrase “the mirror” is literally mirrored. The line about the crease is in the shape of a soft wave, evoking the image of a forehead wrinkle.
The repetition of the word “birthday” is spaced out evenly, like footsteps as the aforementioned acorn cracks beneath my heel. I used soft, warm tones and grain texture in the background, evoking warmth.
In all of these works, the theme of connotation and denotation lingers. What lies underneath literally terms of layer ordering? What lies underneath figuratively as various viewers take away their subjective meanings? In the case of my Carte de Visite, I wonder particularly about the use of my wedding ring. Some may only recognize it as jewelry rather than a symbol of marriage, and in that case they may extrapolate a narrative about a family heirloom or a female relative of importance. Others may see the placement and scale of the ring as religious in a Judeo-Christian context, presuming a definition of marriage that likely contrasts with my personal experience. Still others may receive my true intention of a liberatory commitment, perhaps informed by the adjacent rainbow.
As a designer, one must reckon with the literal and the metaphorical, the denotative and the connotative. No project is complete until you have asked the question: what’s underneath?
