A Beautifully Simple Comic Book for the Blind
- 11:25 am |
Imagine if you could never read another comic—if all of the sudden the pages of your DC Comic books turned into blank, smooth pieces of paper. It would be pretty devastating, right? Braille has come a long way since its invention in the 19th century, but it’s still tough to apply it to the highly-visual storytelling we see in comics. This realization led Phillipp Meyer, a Copenhagen-based interaction designer, to create the first comic for the blind.
“Most of the tactile material that is available for blind people is very information dense,” Meyer tells Wired. “It’s always about information and not often about art.”
Titled “Life,” the comic tells a familiar story: Two characters meet, fall in love and have a child. That child goes off on its own, the parents grow old and then fade away. Only in “Life,” there are no words, no colors and every character is represented by a simple, tactile circle.
Meyer’s goal was to make a comic that was equally translatable for sighted and blind people. Using a method similar to Braille, he embossed paper with circles of varying heights and sizes to represent different characters. For example, one circle fades to flat in the center, while the other is filled in; this helps to distinguish one character from the next. Similarly, each scene is marked by perforations in the paper, creating the same kind of paneling you’d find in a typical comic book.
If the comic seems simple, that’s because it’s supposed to be. While creating “Life,” Meyer asked himself: How reduced can a story be without losing meaning?
He discovered through his interviews with visually impaired people that simply embossing an exact replica of an image onto paper typically didn’t translate. It was too complex and ignored the way blind people perceived tactile input. Rather, simple, recognizable shapes paired with a contextual title and a simple narrative flow was enough for readers to glean a basic understanding of a story. From there, the reader’s imagination is in charge.
“People started creating a love story out of these circles in simple boxes,” he said. “It’s really fascinating.”
Want to know more about “Life?” Check out Meyer’s website.
All Photos: Phillipp Meyer