The graphic novel Persepolis, in addition to being a gripping emotional story and the only comic book to ever bring me to tears, is a masterpiece of comic art and a testimony to what you can accomplish through repetition of basic forms. What Persepolis writer/artist Marjane Satrapi can accomplish with a few simple pen strokes is simply astonishing. When the comic was made into an animated movie, Satrapi’s graphic virtuosity survived and indeed thrived in the translation.

Look at these nine faces of girls listening to a political speech from their schoolteacher in Iran, shortly after the 1979 revolution. All of these faces use exactly the same set of design elements: four curved lines (eyebrows, nose, mouth), a pair of football-shaped ovals and dots (eyes), and an amorphous black shape (hairline). And yet each of these girls doesn’t just look completely unique, each has a unique and distinctive personality — earnest, distracted, doubtful.

I was reminded of a book currently on my desk, Bruno Munari’s Design as Art.

In the book’s second section, Munari argues that images can and should have a deliberate “character” in order to be meaningful and memorable to viewers, and that that character is encapsulated in the subtle and not-so-subtle details of a design’s implementation. The design’s style, if you will. What’s more, it doesn’t take much to achieve this character.

To illustrate this, he includes almost 150 simple pen drawings of faces, each one radically different from the last, and each one clearly drawn in only a matter of a few seconds. The illustrator (or illustrators — it doesn’t matter, really) draws on many cultural drawing styles, but even when those seem exhausted new ideas seem to emerge between the stylizations.

It’s a remarkable illustration of the power of small multiples to help push the boundaries of how one thinks about even the simplest design challenge.

It doesn’t take much to make something unique and different. As Munari’s collection of faces shows, simply focusing on variety at the expense of detail and perfection can give rise to some small but powerful and unexpected new ideas.

This is the point of sketching, of course: ingenuity is an emergent property that is more easily produced by turning your attention away from perfecting a single vision.

Satrapi’s faces, of course, are not sketches — their uniqueness is carefully and tenderly crafted through economy of form and the subtlest lines. But they compellingly illustrate that both character and diversity can be found among things whose basic ingredients are essentially identical, whether by accident and spontaneity or through deliberate craft.

As designers, we should be inspired by Munari’s demonstration of how the same question has a thousand solutions, and Satrapi’s revelation that almost the same solution can solve a thousand different problems.

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A few months ago I heard a fascinating woman interviewed on the radio, Noreen Grice. Ms. Grice is a blind astronomer — something that, while initially surprising to me, actually makes perfect sense when you consider that most of today’s astronomy research is based on radio signals, mathematics, physics, and chemistry — and not at all on optics.

What’s more, she has published a series of books about astronomy specifically targeted at blind and visually-impaired children. When I heard this fact, I knew I had to see that book. Sure enough, Grice’s Touch the Universe is for sale on Amazon. Within days I was holding a copy.

Notice that I said “I had to see that book”. Because ultimately that is how I expected to experience it — with my eyes. Indeed, from the moment I opened the box and laid eyes on it I was drawn to the book’s beauty. But not just because the pictures are visually staggering, which of course almost all astronomic photography is. And not just because the internal design, typography, and layout have a simple grace to them, which they do.

What attracted me the most was the braille. The way the embossed patterns directly translated the images below them, the way there were two languages in play at the same time. This book goes beyond at least my traditional understanding of braille as a language or an alphabet — this is the syntax of touch used for illustration. I closed my eyes and explored the universe.

Here’s a typical spread from the book. Notice how the red spot of Jupiter is expressed as a spiral, and that the spiral is identified in the key below the image area.

Here is a spiral galaxy, NGC-4603, where the density of the raised dots expresses the density of the stars clustered around the galaxy’s core.

The book also features some of the technology used by astronomers, although ironically this is the Hubble Space Telescope, a purely optical instrument.

The funny thing is that this book could in theory have been produced with no ink at all. How unfair it seems that a book for blind people is so pleasant to the sighted, and yet products for the sighted generally proffer so little for the blind.

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I loved this picture so much I just had to find a way to look at it every day to make the moment last. And now, if you have an iPhone, you can, too.

Presenting the Farewell George Bush iPhone Wallpaper!

Download it.

Credit for this image is “Reuters AFP/Saul Loeb/Pool” (UPDATE: Full credits in comments, below). I touched it up and modified it for clarity and to make it fit nicely on the start screen without the iPhone’s UI elements cropping off any of the important and meaningful imagery.

Enjoy!

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