"Navigation is never natural; it is always the expression of a set of cultural assumptions and controls; it is a form of telling that sometimes carries semantic content, but always structures its expression within the constraints of presentation."
– Johanna Drucker (Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation)

An interface presents semantic or narrative units along with graphical devices that provide legible markers for navigation and for establishing hierarchy. In a blog, for example, the segmentation, links, headers, date and time stamps, navigation bars, borders, margins and gutters are not content in themselves, but do the work of framing and ordering content and relations between content. According to Johanna Drucker, graphic devices are integral to reading and understanding all narrative texts. One begins a book by looking over the table of contents, assessing the length and count of chapters and sub-chapters. A book's graphic devices continue to act as "narrative scaffolding" throughout the reading experience. This quick way of taking stock of a book's spatial structure does much cognitive work to prepare for reading.

Drucker also observes that graphic devices often assist the reader in the production of narrative by modeling "the discourse field in ways that constraint or engineer the narrative possibilities for a reader." A book's spatial and navigation structure supports the reader's sense of chronology, causality, suspense and momentum.  In a commercial website, the user is treated with–and often expects–an array of choices and paths. Narrative is not structured within the text, but rather emerges as an effect of navigation. The graphical user interface offers macro and micro views of content and content relations that can stimulate a user's curiosity and desire for more micro-levels of reading/scanning. Graphic devices are narrative to the extent they activate an "urge for meaning, closure or resolution of an experience."

Chris Ware's unique diagrammatic style of storytelling demonstrates the role of graphic devices as tool for the reader to co-produce narrative. To "read" the pages of Lint, to follow the books graphic devices–lines of continuance, typographic grids, size dimensions of panels–is to engage in a complex, distracted and distributed seeing.  Ware presents events, moments in the day-to day lives of characters, that are graphically interrupted or disturbed by other past or future events.  Abstract and emotional mental process such as reflection, comparison, speculation, projection are here displayed as relational panels, nested frames, radial and linear sequencing, repetitions and isolation.

Ware's one electronic work, published as an iPad app, shows how well his graphic/narrative sense translates into database narrative, but perhaps his own displeasure with the project (he will likely not repeat it) also indicates that his dense pictorial style works well with the narrative constraints of the book. The forward momentum provided by the book's graphic and material structure is a counter balance to the inward spiral of each page. Ware's graphic novels are not light-reading. They are charts of the emotional lives of characters in a de-narrativized world. Ware's graphic style includes mimetic gestures, but the organization of place and time is anything but mimetic. These pages are interfaces onto the networks of thought; semiotic spaces that need to be traversed and narrativized by the reader to be recieved as narrative.

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