Karl Gude

Nervous doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling that I had that awful day. My knees shook, my mouth went dry and all of a sudden I had to use the bathroom. The crowd was so large it terrified me. My mind drew a complete blank. And to top it all off, the person who loaded my slides did so pell-mell, without any thought to the strict order that I had requested. The slide show was to be my rock, my order, my salvation. But what first appeared on-screen before me was slide number 18, not one, followed by six, then maybe 23. Complete chaos. I was lost. I’d been hit and the plane was going down. Still, I trudged on.

Bad idea…

It was my first public speaking/teaching experience in the field of information graphics (I’ve never like the word “INFOgraphics.” It sounds trivializing, like a product from the 60s when they put an “o” at the end of everything to make it more palatable, like FIXOdent or BORAXO powder or BRILLO pads.) In the early 1980s when I was the Graphics Director at a then-thriving United Press International I was asked by the New England Newspaper Association to lecture on how a small paper with no graphics department could still produce basic graphics using things like photos and store-bought maps. It was my first invitation to speak about what I did every day.

By the end of my disastrous presentation, I swept the perspiration from my brow for the hundredth time, loosened my new tie and asked if there were any questions. Nothing. Finally someone stood up and broke the silence with this annoyed-sounding question, which still haunts me every time I prepare a lecture: “Karl, would you please tell us just ONE way that we can make a good graphic with limited resources?” Complete and total annihilation…crash…burn.

Now, 25 years later, I’m swimming in piles of reference books, notes, sketches, articles and graphics I’ve collected during my career in visual journalism. The stuff from the 70s and early 80s looks embarrassingly simplistic, but I still love it. Some of the newer materials are embarrassingly complicated. But I still love them. I have to pull together a curriculum for my Fall information graphics classes at Michigan State’s School of Journalism and this is my idea farm. I want the students to learn a LOT. My knees are still shaking, but not so much. Thank God for PowerPoint and the demise of the slide projector.

But what to teach…?

Mapping?…I can’t just breeze through mapping…too many cool ways to map nowadays, y’know. And online animation…must teach animation. Hmmm, but not this time around. First I have to get a handle on it myself. Good. I’ve always wanted to. And charting…whoa… Editors don’t just want little bar charts anymore. Now, it’s like “can you anchor the whole page with statistics?” And 3D? Oh God.

Producing maps, charts and cutaway diagrams is only the beginning. To be the best I want my students to master design theory, the layering of information and the use of color and typography. They should become super skillful illustrators, too, who understand the concept of perspective and drama. At the very least they have to dazzle an employer with their command of Illustrator, PhotoShop and InDesign. (At Newsweek we used Quark…forget that.) Also, 3D software like Maya, web programs like Flash and Dreamweaver, GIS mapping software like ArcView for data maps, Natural Scene Designer for manipulating digital elevation models and satellite imagery and Geocart for drawing various cartographic projections and adding elevation. Google Earth, too. And Excel for charting and number crunching. Can’t ignore photography… Did I forget anything? Damn, some of this stuff I have to learn to teach it.

Then there’s the brain stuff they need to know. They have to become wizards at research, reporting and writing. They have to learn which information can be visualized and which can’t. They have to be good editors, too. Prioritize. Focus. I’m the king of trying to cram all of my fabulously impressive and hard-won research into a tiny, over-stuffed sausage of a graphic.

People stuff, too, is critical to know, like getting along in a tense newsroom…and it gets TENSE. It’s an art form talking an overworked, stressed out, graphic-loathing editor (fortunately, there aren’t many) into carving out space in the middle of their guarded grey matter to wedge a graphic into. I worked at one place where half of the sports department dove under their desks every time they saw me coming. They were afraid I might ask them for something, which meant extra work. I understood, though. We’re all busy enough. In the end that very same department gave up a coveted press credential and insisted I go with them to cover the Barcelona Olympics. (It was strategic on their part, really…if I were there with them they wouldn’t have to constantly feed me stuff.) Chalk one up to diplomacy!

Salesmanship’s useful, too. The students will have to talk the journalists’ game. Go to meetings. Win some respect. Know their editors’ and writers’ subjects and anticipate their needs. Read up on politics, business and international news, the latest in science, sports, medicine and the arts. It’s okay to admit that you don’t know about stuff sometimes, but not all of the time. In other words, be a journalist.

Now, I just have to figure out how to cram all of this fabulously impressive content into an over-stuffed sausage of a curriculum. Prioritize, focus!