Art direction is not a phrase that I was familiar with in the context of data visualization until I listened to a conversation between Alli Torban, host of the podcast Data Viz Today, and information designer Gabrielle Mérite on Episode 59: How Art Direction Can Make Your Work More Effective. This isn’t a recent episode (November 24, 2020), but the conversation between Torban and Mérite touches on a timeless aspect of visual display of information, which is to say its affective power. Art design, according to Mérite, is the ability to communicate the rhetorical, emotional, and ideological aspects of data in ways that resonate with the audience and with the message. Mérite explains:

To me, the difference between design and direction, because I think the issue is that most people don’t know the difference, [is that] designis more about problem solving and finding those design solution[s], the visual solution, and art direction is about evoking the right emotion. It’s a bit … about creating that connection between what you’re seeing and what you’re experiencing.

In other words, in the process of creating effective data visualizations, art direction is a part of the process that integrates the layout, framing, text, and image with the needs of the audience and the message from the data. When the emotional register matches the message (not merely the medium à la Marshall McLuhan), that harmony increases the power of the story the data tells. The idea of art direction may be most familiar in the context of developing a “brand.” In brand design, designers send clients extensive questionnaires that dig into the values, goals, aspirations, and feelings that the clients would like to evoke in relationship to their brand. Setting aside the corporate-speak for a moment, the need to create a cohesive look and feel, user interface, and style guide for a digital humanities project is quite similar. When a project successfully connects with its audience through content and design, the project seems to do more that the sum of its parts.

How, then, do we teach and evaluate affective coherence within a digital project’s graphic design and user interface? What kinds of skills and literacies do we need to help students develop in order to extend their reasoned, logical, and deeply researched scholarly investigation to include the affective and often rhetorical arguments their projects make to the design, implementation, and administration of those projects?

As a capstone and thesis advisor, I find this to be one of the tricker aspects of the project to cultivate, because doing so depends upon dialog, iteration, feedback, and sometimes even redesign and change. They are part of a project’s development that extend the timeline of the work, which–in turn–is also a hurdle to completion. The typical capstone project should take only one semester; however, really leaning into the “art direction” of the project means taking time to test, reevaluate, and redo, something that is likely to carry the project on beyond the single semester.

So far, the way that I have begun to address concerns like these is at the proposal stage. When I’m reading a project proposal for a capstone now, I find myself asking students how they want the audience to feel and how feeling and affect are going to be addressed through the interface or visual and verbal signals embedded into the work. Whether or not that plan is fully realized in the single semester, to me, is less important than evidence that the student has taken time to consider and to account for the “connection between what you’re seeing and what you’re experiencing.” What I say now is that I’d like there to be evidence of intentionality in the project, such as a purposeful selection of color, texture, organization, or technology choice, that extends beyond utility to creating a cohesive experience between the audience’s visual experience and the information conveyed. While the realization of that cohesion may be uneven in the final project, the white paper the student submits should explain where there is evidence of artistic direction in what was produced and what steps the student would take in the future, were they to extend the project, to more fully realize that intent.

Looking ahead, when I teach in the future, I plan to make changes to my syllabus in order to spend at least one week on art direction, design, and affect. I think that more readings on design, on metacognitive processing and memory, and affect theory will help students to be better prepared to marry the design and the information of the site and to think about the ways in which we create a future for the work that conveys not only what users / audiences learn but how they come to knowledge.