Cryptics (12 of 14): Visual Clues

Visions for the future.

Can you figure out the answer to this clue?

Even if you’re up on your film history, lots of movies came out in 1974. The numbers help: we know we’re looking for a film with three words in the title. And the first word is short. Probably something simple like For or The… Why is this font so blurry and hard to read?

Oh, wait! Silly me. The type is in flames, so it’s probably a 1974 film that has something to do with fire. The answer is THE TOWERING INFERNO. (There was a remake a couple years ago, but it didn’t get as much press.)

The clue works because its visual element and verbal element each tell you something different about the answer. Something like…

…would not be as good for INFERNO, because “conflagration” already means “really big fire,” so the fire-letters don’t add any new information. In a way, the prior clue is like a Venn diagram, giving you one zone of “fire-related words and phrases” and one zone of “1974 films” and asking you to find the overlap. (We could assign a third zone to “(3,8,7)” phrases like THE TOWERING INFERNO, NET NATIONAL PRODUCT, and ONE THOUSAND MILLION, but let’s keep this simple.)

This means that your answer, like the answer to a double definition clue, has to have two distinct meanings to exploit, and at least one of them has to be something you can render in visual terms. How often does that happen, anyway?

More often than you’d think…

The answers here are our old friends CATS and FORD, plus ARC.

Visual cues like this have a lot of possibilities, and….some crosswords can exploit them. All too often, in print or online, puzzles are only designed to render their clues in a single typeface. Some can’t even handle italics, which is why you see movie titles like The Towering Inferno rendered in quotes instead (“The Towering Inferno”).

My own system could do italics and certain odd punctuations, so I used those in a handful of clues, but none so splashy as what you see above.

There are also economic issues. Giving a puzzle a visual dimension means it becomes graphic design work, and that means either a graphic designer needs to get paid or graphic design is going unpaid. And the question of who needs to get paid for what can get complicated.

But these are hurdles, not firm barriers. Plenty of published puzzles have played with words in visual ways like this. I’ll get more into that topic when discussing a later section, which has a more visual theme.

But tomorrow…it’ll be time to discuss cryptic grids!