Improve pictures through placement and cropping.

Effective photo-editors and publication designers must do more than just choose pictures that best tell the story. They must also create relationships and meaning through careful picture positioning. The four photographs in the accompanying story are quite ordinary in terms of visual content. Yet because of how they are cropped and related to each other on the page, this quartet of images becomes unified and takes on fresh meaning.

The pictures were shot for Gap Gemini America's (New York, N.Y.) employee publication by Brian Eslinger, a Minneapolis, Minn., freelancer. They show some of this company's employees participating in a Paint-a-thon. None of these images are particularly incongruous. And none of these people are expressing strong feelings about the task at hand. Yet when Detroit, Mich., freelance designer Linda Liske places these pictures into a layout, the whole manages to become stronger than any individual part.

Eslinger includes critical context in each picture - the parts of the building being painted. Liske uses this context the gutters and wood trim of house roofs - as "geometrical glue" to bind the layout together. She crops and places the shot of the horizontal man squeezing into a tight spot down at the very bottom of the page. He seems crushed by all of that weight. She crops and places the shot of the man peering over the top of the roof at the top of the page, creating visual bookends for this picture story.

Liske carefully makes all four pictures flow into each other by connecting the thrusting roof lines into a bottom-to-top relationship. The roof in the lower shot leads our eyes to the ladder in the picture at middle left. The silhouetted roof in this picture blends into the silhouette of another roof in the picture to the right of it. This merger creates a connecting link in the center of the layout, pointing to and supporting still another roof at the top of the layout. Four people and four roofs are unified into one cohesively related layout that slams home the message from bottom to top: We came, we saw, we painted roofs.

Philip N. Douglis, ABC, director of The Douglis Visual Workshops and widely known photographic consultant and critic, now offers his introductory Communicating with Pictures workshops twice each year in Sedona, Ariz. He also continues to present special seminars on photographic communication on a sponsored, in-house basis to companies, associations and IABC chapters. For information call [phone]. Douglis also welcomes tearsheets for possible use in this column. Send to The Douglis Visual Workshops, 76 Ridge Rock Road, Sedona, AZ 86351.