Scott Hull Associates

Illustrator John Maggard walks us into the steel heart of the creative designer.

Is “infographics” still a legit term? I’m not sure, since a lot of my reading of late has been occupied with books like “The New Catechism of the Steam Engine”, and my inner engineer is loving every minute of it.

Have you ever seen those late-night or early morning black & white films of white-hot slabs of steel crashing through giant rollers while fountains of sparks fly under a busy, dramatic industrial-documentary soundtrack? The mill engine pictured was one of hundreds that used to drive those mill stands, running like fine Swiss watches for years at a time – all polished brass and rhythmic rods and valves, decades before the Sci-Fi mags illustrated giant flying spaceships with “new” electric dynamos as powerplants of the future.

This is a still frame from a longer animation I made for a friend in Youngstown Ohio whose specialty is saving, refurbishing and displaying giant steel industry artifacts – no small feat when dealing with items where the smallest part weighs a couple hundred pounds. He’s reassembled the engine across town at his museum but wanted it shown in its original setting, working under steam, and an animation of the machine seemed like a natural solution.

The animation was seen by a client with a similar desire to show a piece of industrial Americana at work. But this time it was important to show the inner workings of not only the steam engine but also the machinery it operated. They needed a visual of it intact and in place, an image impossible to see from the outside alone.

The second and third stills show a small piece of the next project – a speed governor device – that is at once a thing of sculptural beauty (to some of us, anyway) and an emblem of a past industrial age. These installations had a design and aesthetic that was incidental to their main function, but powerful in its own right.

I’ve always believed in the phrase, “To each their own.” But my small town is about to replace its traffic signals, and their attendant tangles of wire, poles, transformers and guy wires, with newer and sleeker metal stanchions. Allegedly it’s for the purpose of beautification of the intersection…but somehow I know it just won’t have the same interesting silhouette at twilight.

Sections of the full animations are here: