The Five Rules of Harmony in the Art of Federica Fragapane
Data visualization as an art should strive for harmony. Here’s how award-winning information designer Federica Fragapane achieves it.
Do you know what makes a painting beautiful? We’ll talk about that, but first let me tell you a short story.
A few years ago, I got interested in animation movies. I read about the history of the Walt Disney Company and learned how to draw figures, hands, feet, and cartoon animals. I understood that artists should always “draw the story” (Walt Stanchfield) using verbs instead of nouns, to give life to static drawings. For example: if you are drawing a “woman after bath”, is she bending over, stretching her arms or pulling her hair?
This was all very interesting but lacked structure. I knew that beauty should be a main concern in storytelling, but what makes a story beautiful, in the end? It was very mysterious until I discovered storyboarding.
Storyboarding is the first step of visual storytelling, the writing of a story using only small images that represent the main beats of a scene. Storyboarding is the fabric of visual stories, and it taught me how to harmoniously direct the viewers’ attention like a magician. Storyboards apply the rules of…
