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Lean Into It!

Telling a Visual Story in Photographic and Graphic Design

By K C PhillipsPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Digital entertainment has redefined the way we view the cycles of our favorite aesthetics and designs. As culture and entertainment accelerates, we’re left in a constant, frantic frenzy of style invention, aesthetic perversion, and entertainment subversion. This is why when I edit a photo, I edit for the surreal.

In photography, the best photographers I know take stunningly hyper-real pictures of beautiful places or fascinating actions. These photographers are all better photographers than me. I don’t have a fancy camera, or a nice camera, or a camera that isn’t connected to my phone. I'm not interested in making something that looks beautiful because it isn't financially available to me; I'm concerned with making something dramatic. Without a camera, I have a problem to solve: how can I take a cool photo that doesn’t look particularly good? I lean into it. These photographs will never look realistic, so I chop, screw, and otherwise destroy their original integrity to make something new.

My process is pretty simple: I take a photograph of something that I think can be used to tell a story and I edit the photograph to tell that story. Unfortunately, I haven't taken any photographs recently, so we're going to use somebody else's. For example: here’s what the Malcolm Moos Health Sciences tower in Minneapolis looks like according to a Google search:

Submitted to Reddit by user Pysl

What story do I want the viewer to tell themselves? This is a brutalist building with stern presence, looming over the street like a citadel or a watchtower. It looks like it's wearing a suit of armor. This building communicates power, strength, coldness, sharpness. I'm going to want to lean into that. I want to tell the story of a harsh, bureaucratic place where people come in and never come out.

My plan is to alter the colors in this image to communicate discomfort. I'm looking for something dark and alien. I want you to be able to take one look at this photograph and know instantly everything that the designer wanted you to. The first step in the process is adding some funky colors. I use Photoshop to add a gradient over the whole layer, and then blend that gradient by selecting “overlay”.

On the left, the gradient. On the right, the result.

This is a good start, but it doesn't exactly communicate any of what I'm looking for. The yellow sky makes it look alien and strange, but the colors are too friendly. What I do now is continue to add different kinds of gradients to blend in different ways. This process takes as long or as little as you need it to before you land on something you like.

To achieve this look, I also used a paint bucket to blacken the sky.

I finally settle on something impossible: a bright redness that ends at the horizon, with an infinitely black sky. I use a layer of reticulation to increase the graininess, because the picture already isn't a very high quality. By leaning into the photograph's antiquation, I can create a dreadful kind of nostalgic look. This photo looks more like a screenshot from an old computer game than a photograph.

The next step is more graphic design oriented and less photographic design oriented, but adding text to your image can help to add context. In this instance, we're going to go with something vague to force the viewer into creating their own context. To do this, I'm going to read some advertisement from the McDonald's website. Let's pick something random that can be interpreted a few ways.

And select a font that is congruent with your design. If you use stern, dark colors like this to tell a dreadful somber story, you should stick to a stern font.

And just like that, you've created a piece of multimedia photographic art. Not everyone has an eye for photography, or even the camera to make it happen, but when you approach photographic design from a story-oriented mindset you can lean into your weaknesses to build a unique scene all your own.

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About the Creator

K C Phillips

Adult but bad at it!

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