DD2000 Editorial Illustration part3.

How much do I admire the work of Noma Bar? let me count the ways...Trained as Hebrew Typographer(actually a Bachelor in Graphic and Typographic design) in Israel the country of his birth. Noma came to London in 2000. Not being able to speak the English very well,he says compelled him to communicate in another way, Pictograms.

Front cover of Negative Space.

A pictogram needs to to be succinct and obvious,yet there always seems to be an ambiguity in any pictorial representation. Noma uses the eyes desire to "find" a meaning in symbols to great effect in his portrait work.
Noma has been qouted as saying "I'am after Maximum communication using the minimum of elements".

Travel Pictograms.

Seldom using more than 3 colours/shades in his work,the lack of colour variation is a neccesity to keep the image "readable" I'm sure you could assemble the same images using collage elements but the result would be visually disparate.  His compositions ARE the picture,not just an aesthetic design choice but key to the construction of a recognisable portrait or idiomatic symbol,using key elements associated with his chosen subject,weather a person or an editorial brief to assemble a visual pun or satirical image.

Mr Allajimhdad and Mr Spock

Although Bar assemble his images with the use of computer software,this is only after many hours of sketchbook work,he lives in a flat overlooking a wooded area in London and spend up to 5 hours a day sitting on the park benches sketching life as it passes by. He stated recently in an interview in the New-Yorker that a portrait of Fever Pitch/High Fidelity author Nick Hornby required over 200 drafts before Noma was happy with the result. At first glance this may seem  like a lot,but the pare-ing down of an original idea into a succinct and coherent final image must require many hours of "tweaking".

Nick Hornby(left) George Dubya(right)

Some critics see Noma's work as little more than "logo's" for the celebrity age,akin to the Nike swoosh or the golden arches of Mc'donald's. I think this is a miss-reading of the images,yes they are easily recognizable(a feat in itself) but they also seek to comment on a subject purely using visual language. When given the brief of the Bush administration's complicity in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, not many illustrators

would have come up with something as succinct and sly as Noma Bar's response,perhaps it is too clean and too static for the subject matter but it works on the level of tie-ing the two elements of the story together into one coherent final piece.

Ed Allen