If you’re addicted to reruns of Law & Order and CSI, or if forensics holds a special fascination, perhaps you should consider applying your design skills to serve truth and justice—seriously!

It takes a special mind-set to wrangle complex processes and information into infographics and animations understandable to the layperson. In fact, this graphic specialty can be rewarding, challenging and satisfying. Just ask Stacey Manela, founder of The Art of Facts, a legal-services design company whose work is highly regarded by lawyers seeking the most powerful ways to present cases at trial.

PHYSICS TEXTS, JUNKYARDS & COCKTAILS
Manela was a designer at an ad agency who stumbled into this specialty by accident. “At the ad agency, I always wondered whether my work was having an effect on anybody,” she says. “Now I wish I had a dollar for every juror who said, after trial, they didn’t understand the fraud—or other criminal act—until the jury saw the timeline, or animation, or flow chart. It is the best professional feeling.”

As is often the case, serendipity led Manela to this unusual niche. While freelancing at a print shop, she met a trial lawyer who needed someone to, as the lawyer put it, “make emonstratives.” Manela did such a good job, he hired her at his law firm to work on technology and graphics; after seven years there, she started her own company, which works for both plaintiffs and defendants. “We basically brand the case,” Manela says. “We do everything from complex infographics and animations to building a database of documents and deposition videotapes in the discovery phase of the trial. We can edit and search instantaneously in the courtroom, which is enormously helpful to juries, lawyers and judges.”

Manela’s work can involve the explication of complex concepts from physics, chemistry and other branches of science. Or it can take her, as one auto-manufacturer liability case did, into prop-making and theatrics: “We went to a junkyard and found the exact Ford Escort frame that was at issue and welded it to a dolly. I sewed a child-sized dummy, and we strapped it into the seat. When the judge saw us wheeling that into the courtroom, he told the opposing counsel they had better settle the case!” She says she gets to work with the smartest experts and finds great satisfaction in empowering the jury to make the best decision. “And it makes me more fun at cocktail parties.”

GETTING COZY WITH THE LAW
Law firms make good clients, Manela notes, because they are willing to spend the money to produce trial-related graphics, and they appre­ciate the power of visual representations to strengthen their cases.

Richard K. Sherwin is a professor of law and director of the Visual Persuasion Project at New York Law School. He writes and lectures widely about the importance of visualization in the prac­tice, theory and teaching of law, especially in our pervasively visual digital era. He says the project was formed “to study and advance the cultivation of critical visual intelligence; to inspire creative visualizations of evidence, case narratives, policy analysis and legal argumentation; and to help lawyers, judges, law students and the lay public integrate new visual tools into more traditional—textual and verbal—approaches to legal analysis.” Or, in lay terms: Law­yers need well-thought-out graphics to clarify their cases.

CAREERS TRANSFORMED
Some design detectives start out on the other side of the law. The best-known example, Frank Abagnale, was the con man and master forger whose life was portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Catch Me if You Can. Abagnale now earns an honest living as a consultant to various law enforcement agencies and even to multinational corporations. He specializes in the detection of elaborately conceived forgeries.

Other transformed careers take a more circuitous—and honest—route. Barbara Glauber, a founder of Thesmokinggun.com, inadvertently became a design detective when her journalist husband and a friend wanted to make use of mountains of court filings, police mug shots and other documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. When they decided to publish the material online, it was Glauber’s design skills in organizing and formatting that rendered it useful and navigable. The site has grown to include audio (mobsters’ wiretapped conversations) and video (surveillance tapes).

DELVING INTO HISTORY
One remarkable tour-de-force of detective work by a designer aided in investigating the identity of a Nazi war criminal. It was an effort to place a German officer at the scene of the infamous ramp at Auschwitz where the grisly selection process of those arriving at the camp was conducted (some were to be sent to death and some were determined to be fit for work).

In 1963 Nazi S.S. officer Karl Hoecker was charged with complicity in three mass murder charges, each involving at least a thousand victims. Hoecker denied the accusations and, due to a lack of convincing evidence of his direct involvement in the fate of the prisoners at Auschwitz, he escaped the most serious charges, receiving a sentence of seven years. In 2006 a never-before-seen photo album portraying Nazi officers at Auschwitz was given to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., by an elderly American Army officer, who had found the album in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt after the war ended. When archivists compared these photographs with others already at the museum, it appeared they might be able to corroborate theories about previously unidentified officers.

One previously available photo of the ramp at Auschwitz showed an officer with his back to the camera; this was believed to be Karl Hoecker. But in the absence of other evidence, this was only conjecture. In 2007, a documentary filmmaker came to the museum to make a film about the album; he was Erik Nelson, who specializes in what he terms “forensic history,” investigat­ing disputed historical events. At the request of museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding, Nelson set out to identify the officer in the photograph with his back to the camera. He enlisted the help of graphic designer Douglas Martin to create a comparison with known photographs of Karl Hoecker and other officers in the “ramp” photo, employing records of Hoecker’s height and other measurable factors including trouser inseam length and shoulder width. Martin confirmed these comparisons with measurable ele­ments in the same photographs, such as the proportions of a rifle in a shooting range in one photograph where Hoecker was facing the camera squarely. In the Auschwitz ramp photo, Martin used the measurements of the railroad tracks visible in the background to establish that the height and proportions of the officer matched those of Hoecker by entering the measurements into the 3D graphic program Maya. Although the proportions matched perfectly, it was later determined that, due to other factors, the evidence was inconclusive. Nonetheless, Martin’s detective work played a critical role in the investigation.

DIMENSIONS OF DECEPTION
Photographs may, of course, deceive as well as confirm: There has been of late much ado in journalistic circles about photo manipu­lation—not just the prettification and perfecting of celebrities and models (the kind of ho-hum routine retouching we have come to expect), but the deliberate distortion of the truth. An example is a July 2008 photo of Iranian missile testing, where a just-launched missile was duplicated in the frame to dramatize the event … and cover up the fact that one of the missiles failed to fire. The doctored photo ran in many major newspapers and websites, but soon the manipulation was discovered, and news outlets rushed to print follow-up stories and corrections.

So the question becomes whether we can trust the contents of an image in this increasingly deceptive digital era. Enter Photoshop sleuths Alin Popescu and Hany Farid, who developed an image-processing algorithm that reveals alterations in patterns of pixels. Their software exposes digital forgeries by detecting digital resampling (distortions, resizing, rotations) unapparent to the naked eye.

Images can deceive; so may letterforms. A real-life example of typographic fraud played out in presidential politics when George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard duty in 1972 was called into question. In 2004 four memos intended to verify his service were reproduced on CBS News. The memos immediately came under media scrutiny.

Thomas Phinney, Adobe’s product manager for fonts and global typography, was one of the main consultants tapped to ana­lyze the memos. (Phinney commented in an interview with Sandee Cohen on creativepro.com that “analyzing documents to figure out if they’re forged is my idea of a good time … doesn’t everybody want to play Sherlock Holmes?”) Phinney was asked by The Washington Post, ABC News and Newsweek to weigh in on the likelihood the memos were fabricated. Although letterforms in the memos were greatly distorted due to faxing, scanning and exporting at low resolution, Phinney felt there was enough evidence to conclude the likelihood of fraud was high. His research and analysis centered on the availability in 1972 of proportionally spaced fonts on typewriters, ligatures that appeared to be generated by computer, and the likely suppression of automatically generated super­scripted characters in Microsoft Word (see the links at the end of this article; The Washington Post’s website has a graphic which sum­marizes all of the discrepancies).

Other forms of design detection, albeit with less serious consequences, include Mark Simonsen’s well-known Ms-studio.com website, which “outs” historically incorrect typography used in films. While the latter site provides entertainment value for the type-obsessed, those artists whose efforts have resulted in more knowledgeable jury verdicts, certification of photographic integrity, resolution of historical mysteries, and the exposition of fraud may feel justifiably proud about putting their design skills to demonstrably high-minded and important purposes.

www.artoffacts.com | www.nyls.edu/pages/2734.asp | www.thesmokinggun.com | www.pdnonline.com/pdn/newswire/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003826529 | www.creativepro.com/article/the-digital-dish-making-headlines-not-setting-them | www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/graphics/cbsdocs_091804.html | http://www.ms-studio.com/typecasting.html

TOP: This timeline illustrates the development of wireless technology. Created by legal-services design company The Art of Facts, these graphics helped jurors understand the issues in a lawsuit involving an easement for a cell phone tower/power line. IMAGE COURTESY THE ART OF FACTS