Dec 11, 2021
I can’t hear without the subtitles on
19th August, 2021 | Environmental Graphics
It was a regular Friday night as I sat in front of my laptop with my warm plate of noodles. My eyes were going through the array of subtitles streaming in front of me, perfectly complementing the beautiful graphics of Spirited Away.
I don’t mind them, in fact keeping the subtitles on is a personal choice, for which sometimes people judge me for. I have it on when I’m too tired to put effort into hearing what a person is saying… which is always.
Ten minutes into the film and the words start glitching. The words aren’t matching Chihiro’s cry of being separated from her parents. After several attempts at reloading, hoping it’s an internet issue, I gave up. I didn’t want to watch something I couldn’t understand fully. It didn’t seem right.
This is when the conversation in class struck me. An environment’s overall experience is effected by everything complementing it. A foreign film a with a series of visuals can only make complete sense when it is interspersed with timely, accurate, and readable subtitles. They bring in ease and comfort into anyone watching something they can’t decipher. This is not to say that one cannot watch a foreign film without subtitles, visuals itself can lead to a hundred different interpretations of the same film, but it also leads to different understandings and an entire gush of emotions when you do understand it.
I recently read an article which talked about the absence of proper type design for subtitles. Companies or television channels create an entire font set for their branding but when it comes to choosing subtitles which is clear, readable and correctly timed, they falter.
Thus, text is an important part of visual design. Text, either combined with graphics or by itself, can be considered a visual element in itself. An interesting point which was brought up in class was that “Type can be considered a graphic form to someone who doesn’t understand the script”.
For someone who doesn’t understand a script, or any script at all, a letter can be an abstract form or just shapes swirling around on a canvas. This made more sense when we were given an assignment to create a poster using Indic scripts. For most of us who understand only two scripts, the other letters from a foreign script were chosen solely on their looks. How they curved, their tail swooshing the below the X height, their roundness, their ability to fit together elegantly, while also creating something which is pleasing to the eye.
Just like type there are other, not so obvious, graphic design elements in the environment that can be differentiated either through shape, size, colour, text, proximity or position.
Almost everything in the environment signifies something. Be it a school bus, an army uniform, posters, the kind of clothes we wear, our tattoos etc. All these elements together make the environment that surrounds us, helping us make sense of our environment and bringing everything together for us to feel grounded, be it consciously or unconsciously. Visual references like the Yellow colour of a school bus or a giant green army bus are signifiers which create aspirations for “others” to aspire to be in that position. It creates a psychological and visible separation between the ones that “have it all” and those who don’t.
