When I was teaching information design courses at Portland State, I kept encountering a frustrating phenomenon: academic journal articles about design were often replete of any visual elements. What images did exist were typically graphs representing experimental research results, but rarely—if ever—were there images demonstrating the visual concepts being discussed. And, in at least one case, where images initially appeared in a print journal, the online archive of the article simply read, “[IMAGE OMITTED]”.
This became a bit of a pet peeve of mine. It appeared there was something systemic at play that made it near-impossible for information to be included in these articles in any format other than text. So when I learned that Communication Design Quarterly was doing a call for articles on a special issue dedicated to technical communication infrastructure, I decided to submit an article structured as an infographic. I opted for a more comic-book style aesthetic to because that felt more accessible to the target audience and also provided a playful backdrop for a piece that in many ways is intended to poke fun at the very system that enabled its publication.
Going through this process helped underscore for me why images weren’t more commonplace: the entire path to publication seemed to be entirely text-centric. But after much back-and-forth and several revisions, the infographic was complete!
