I recently saw an anti-gay graphic on JoeMyGod that excels so thoroughly at destroying its own message it feels like the best worst graphic ever. I’m an instructional designer and a big part of my job is creating direct, clear, effective messaging, so I felt compelled, almost as a professional exercise, to analyze what makes it so perfectly disastrous. This is probably just for my fellow geeks, nerds, and dorks, but have a look at this masterpiece.
Most people, when they first look at this, absorb the photos before the headlines or captions. Pictures have more immediacy than long word-strings. Pictures, in fact, distract from words. I recall a study that showed students learning about lightning actually retained less knowledge when the lesson’s verbal description was accompanied by pretty lightning pictures. The pictures split their attention and decreased their ability to focus on words. Pictures are only effective when they reinforce and add to the basic message.
And if you take away the words, what message do these pictures send? That anti-gay protesters today are eerily reminiscent of anti-black protesters from generations ago. In fact, if you couldn’t read speak English you’d probably assume the graphic is a huge slam at the foes of marriage equality. I could stop there, because nothing else matters — the picture has made its point — but let’s continue.
Suppose the viewers, now primed with a pro-equality message, move on to the words. A few appear bigger than the rest, so their eyes first notice this:
- In 1963 and In 2015
- Civil Rights and Moral
- Alabama and Alabama
The message for the primed reader is clear:
- 1963 is like 2015
- Civil Rights are a Moral issue
- Alabama is, once again, acting like Alabama
In each case the typography reinforces the pictorial message. It even points out the flaw in the intended message, which seems to want to set up a distinction between civil rights and morality — as if civil rights weren’t a moral issue, as if they were separate things — but ends up graphically doing just the opposite.
What about the rest of each headline? The meat doesn’t come until the end of each, with the words right and wrong (which aren’t just at the end, but aren’t even emphasized!). Furthermore, wrong is in a gray that fades into the black/white/gray of the picture. Not that we need typographic help to minimize that message. A simple rule is this: the more words you toss onto an image, the less power those words have. The graphic designer is in constant battle with the viewer’s attention span and myriad distractions, so drowning a graphic in a flood of text is a good way to ensure the text isn’t read.
But let’s soldier on and imagine viewers haven’t already skipped to the next post in their Facebook feed. A primed reader will find the headlines nonsensical — or at least counter-intuitive — and the rest of the text helps none at all. The Bible verses on the left side affirm our common humanity, and now seem like condemnations not just of racism but of homophobia, too. Viewers who start on the left and move to the right will thus be further primed to reject the anti-gay verses there as bigoted, or more charitably, as archaic and irrelevant. All this culminates in the sentence at the very bottom, which now seems to declare that opponents of marriage equality aren’t just abandoning the right side of history, but are violating God’s Law as well.
Not that most viewers will go through a careful analysis. Instead, all this will be synthesized into one simple and unintended message:
These people are idiots, too dim to realize how dim they are.
And by “these people” I mean those in the left pic, those on the right, and those who created the graphic as well. That’s catastrophic. Researchers have found that when people are confronted with a difficult question, they opt out by substituting an easier question in its place. For instance, instead of asking, What are the moral cases for and against same-sex marriage?, they’ll divert to Which group do I want to be part of?
And nobody want to be part of the idiots.