Archive: Design
February 20, 2010, 10:42 am
Visualizing More Affordable Care
by Henry Woodbury
The February 2010 issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology features work by Dynamic Diagrams for an article titled Alternatives to a Routine Follow-Up Visit for Early Medical Abortion. The article describes a protocol for assessing a woman’s health after an abortion without routine use of ultrasonography. To quote from the abstract:
We constructed five model algorithms for evaluating women’s postabortion status, each using a different assortment of data. Four of the algorithms (algorithms 1–4) rely on data collected by the woman and on the results of the low-sensitivity pregnancy test. Algorithm 5 relies on the woman’s assessment, the results of the pregnancy test, and follow-up physician assessment (sometimes including bimanual or speculum examination).
A sponsor of the study, Gynuity Health Products, asked Dynamic Diagrams to visualize the data. Our explanation shows the results for the current standard of care and five algorithms tested by the researchers. For each approach we show the total number of cases, the number of women returning to a clinic for a follow-up visit, and the number of women receiving a follow-up ultrasound. In contrasting colors we show specific additional treatment cases in two columns; those identified by the protocol on the left vs. those not necessarily identified by the protocol on the right. In large type we provided the percentage of the number of follow-up ultrasounds to the total number of cases. This combination of rich data points and a key percentage makes it easy to compare the effectiveness of each algorithm. A sample of this visual language (without labels) is shown below:
While we cannot reprint the full text of article, we can provide the visual explanation used as Figure 2: Algorithms identifying women who received additional care after medical abortion (PDF, 409K).
February 16, 2010, 9:47 am
Old Search Engines Never Die…
by Henry Woodbury
Jacob Gube at design site Six Revisions uses the Way Back Machine to create a “then and now” piece on search engines. It’s worth a look, just for the screenshots. Chrome and content tell a story. For most of those still around, lots of chrome and lots of links have faded away, replaced by minimal chrome and minimal links.
MetaCrawler and WebCrawler are still around. They look like Google.
February 15, 2010, 4:01 pm
Cressey Performance Web Site Relaunches
by Henry Woodbury
Our latest web site design is for Cressey Performance in nearby Hudson, Massachusetts. Cressey Performance is a weight-training gym with an international reputation for its work with competitive athletes, from youth sports to professionals. Directed by the highly-respected Eric Cressey, the facility is a go-to training destination for professional baseball players, including Kevin Youkilis of the Boston Red Sox, as well as other elite athletes such as 2010 USA Olympic Bobsledder Bree Schaaf.
The site is designed around a tight core of informational pages about the facility, while a new CP Blog provides an ongoing venue for current news, training videos, and links to the top stories at the separate blogs maintained by Eric Cressey and staff nutritionist Brian St. Pierre.
December 16, 2009, 9:35 am
Alphabet Makeover
by Kirsten Robinson
The Onion cleverly skewers design makeovers for the sake of newness and freshness AND over-reliance on focus groups in their hilarious article, “Alphabet Updated with 15 Exciting New Letters.”
Skywriting with the new, improved alphabet. Source: The Onion
December 3, 2009, 11:28 am
What once was print…
by Matt DeMeis
…is now being done very effectively with new technology. Flyp media captures that cozy feeling of thumbing through a magazine and translates it to the internet in one of the best ways I have seen in a while. It’s news, in a more exciting format. Video, audio and elegantly designed layouts definitely give a nod to the print world, all while being more exciting than a piece of paper could ever be.
December 2, 2009, 3:31 pm
Highly Targeted Healthcare Marketing
by Matt DeMeis
These days health care is a slippery subject. This isn’t about politics or any of that. Today I came across (what I think to be) a brilliant way of marketing health care to an audience that usually forgoes coverage, Xtreme sports enthusiasts. Tonik Health Insurance has taken the daunting task of securing coverage for yourself and made it incredibly easy.
Tonik targets a finite demographic and gives them access to the information the need in a design they can relate to. In one or two clicks I was able to find all that I needed to know about purchasing a plan from them. Once you decide on a coverage level you simply fill out a form. For comparison I went to an undisclosed giant’s web site to try and find the same info (still pretending I was an Xtreme sports enthusiast of course). I gave up after some dead end digging and suggestions to download PDFs. It seemed more effort was put into the stock photography than the user experience. Ease of use is CRUCIAL for the audience Tonik is targeting. Their potential customer wants information fast. No digging. No downloading.
The design is great. Loud but very minimalist. It’s tailored for a younger, action sports lifestyle audience and it does that perfectly. Bold colors and lots of flash but these things don’t hide the information. Wonder what “$5000 deductible” means on the thrill-seeker plan? click the question mark next to the word. Easy.
Now to be fair it must be noted that Tonik is a division of Blue Cross, an industry giant. They don’t serve every demographic, there is no “family thrill-seeker” package yet, but there is a lot to be learned by how smart and easy this site has made a somewhat complicated decision. Check it out at www.tonikhealth.com
November 18, 2009, 8:55 am
Resume as Infographic
by Kirsten Robinson
Designer Michael Anderson has created an infographic representation of his resume:
View the full-size image.
November 17, 2009, 5:16 pm
The Sweet Spot Between Information and Design
by Kim Looney
Trying to explain what information design is to our families and friends, and yes, potential clients, has been an ongoing challenge for us here at Dynamic Diagrams. Verbally, I usually resort to something about creating visual explanations for complex sets of data. But that doesn’t really satisfy anyone.
Venn Diagram
Information is Beautiful recently took on the same question on their blog. Their visual approach tries to show–with a Venn diagram-in-progress–what information is; what design is; and what happens when these overlap. Not every product of the two entities is a win: some are useless, some are ugly, and some are boring. But, there is a sweet spot where interestingness + function + form + integrity = successful information design.
November 17, 2009, 11:27 am
Typography on TV
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times runs a breezy article on typography mistakes in popular culture which fortunately links to Mark Simonson’s incisive review of the typography in the television show “Mad Men”. Here’s an sample of Simonson’s critique:
These lipstick ads feature Fenice (1980) with Balmoral (1978) for the script caps. Amazone (1958) for the script lowercase is fine here, but the outline looks too much like a modern computer graphics effect (which is what it is).
November 9, 2009, 11:20 am
Abstract Berlin
by Henry Woodbury
Christopher Niemann has combined history and personal narrative to tell the story of the Berlin Wall, in words and stunningly simple images:
Niemann’s iconic images reference specific events and larger ideas. One image shows an East German border guard hurdling barbed wire to escape into the West. Other images remind me of M.C. Escher’s tessellated patterns, reduced to elemental form. Niemann’s underlying theme is the transformation of a city, history as augury and echo.
November 5, 2009, 12:25 pm
Follow the Necktie
by Henry Woodbury
It is always interesting to me to see how designers using different methods tackle some of the same visualization challenges that we do. How do you represent an abstract idea like “mobility” or “business”?
Here is Virtualization in Plain English, a marketing video for Intel made by Common Craft.
Keep track of that necktie.
October 30, 2009, 3:39 pm
Hey Jude, Don’t Get Confused
by Henry Woodbury
Created by love all this (hat tip to Sippican Cottage).
September 30, 2009, 9:10 am
TDR Launches New Interface Design
by Henry Woodbury
Today TDR updated their site with a new banner, color palette, and home page layout.
The design and roll out resulted from close partnership between TDR, Dynamic Diagrams, and other consultants. The result is a fresh look and a home page layout that reflects the evolving use of the site.
Co-sponsored by UNICEF, UNDP, the World Bank, and WHO, TDR, “funds research in infectious diseases of poverty, and provides support and training to researchers and institutions in the countries where these diseases occur.”
September 25, 2009, 3:32 pm
Data in the Round
by Henry Woodbury
An interesting, but flawed chart at O&G Next Generation shows how much oil the United States imports from other countries:
There are several big problems with this chart. First, U.S. oil imports per day by country is linear data. When one-dimensional values are presented as two-dimensional areas, proportional differences between values are rarely perceived correctly. This problem is compounded by the placement of the data blobs on the global map. It is good to attach each blob to a country, but not good to scatter them both vertically and horizontally. With a little design attention the values could be presented as bars and aligned along a single x-axis in the tropics.
Another problem is that several important data points aren’t shown. Most importantly we need a figure for the United State’s domestic production. This is vital for context. Upon investigation, we find that the bar chart on the bottom left is either not accurate or not tracking the same petroleum product as the map. If you subtract Total Imports from U.S. Consumption for 2008 you get a ballpark figure of around 6,000 thousand barrels per day. This is far off the mark. The real number for 2008 is 4,921 thousand barrels per day, a little bit less than total U.S. crude produced since a small amount of U.S. crude is exported. In June 2009, domestically produced minus exported crude is 5,126 thousand barrels per day.
Another missing figure is the total of oil imports from all countries after the top 10. Once we can look up the June 2009 total for all countries — 9,172 thousand barrels per day — we can easily calculate the sum of all countries after the top 10. The long tail total turns out to be 1,613 thousand barrels per day which is greater than all but Canada. The 9,172 total and various subtotals also allow us to validate the 82% percentage on the far right and update the 2007 ratio of 60% to the actual June 2009 ratio of 64%.
If we add circles to show the oil consumed by the United States from its own production and the “Rest of World” total identified above, the chart looks something like this:
It is even more difficult to read. But that’s not a problem with the data. The data needs to be shown. The problem is with the presentation. The chart still shows linear values with areas, it still doesn’t show totals, it still uses an out-of-date figure from 2007 on the far right, it still has questionable, out-of-date data on the bottom left, and it still has a jumble of factoids on the bottom right that don’t relate the data above. Alas, I am out of time.
September 16, 2009, 11:05 am
Mobile Accessibility
by Matt DeMeis
Not being an iPhone owner, I can’t personally comment on the ease of use of the device. Regardless, I was impressed by this video on the accessibility features of the 3GS. It’s hard for anyone with their eyesight to grasp just how well this would work for someone who is visually impaired, but to me it seems like Apple did great job.
September 15, 2009, 12:20 pm
Lego Little People Calendar
by Lisa Agustin
Little people part 2: Lego is issuing its first calendar in the UK this week, as a charity effort benefiting the National Autistic Society. Each month features the famed –and often quite terrified–’minifigs’ participating in seasonal activities. By the way, if you ever wondered how these minifigs come into being, check out this video of the production line.
(Thanks CR Blog)
September 4, 2009, 1:12 pm
The Times Goes Google on Us
by Henry Woodbury
I just discovered the New York Times Developer Network.
This resource provides data from The Times to third party developers through content-related APIs:
Our APIs (application programming interfaces) allow you to programmatically access New York Times data for use in your own applications. Our goal is to facilitate a wide range of uses, from custom link lists to complex visualizations. Why just read the news when you can hack it?
Most or all of the APIs respond to a query by returning data in XML or JSON format. Some developers have built custom search engines and topic-specific mashups around this functionality. Others are more interested in the sheer excess of the data — and how it can be visualized.
Artist Jer Thorp is one of the latter. Thorp accesses the Times Article Search API to create visualizations that compare the frequency of key words over time. The image below, for example, compares ’sex’ and ’scandal’ from 1981 – 2008:
When you zoom in, the visualization reveals branching segments called “org facets”. Thorp writes:
[These are] organizations which were associated with the stories that were found in the keyword search. This is one of the nicest things about the NYTimes API – you can ask for and process all kinds of interesting information past the standard “how many articles?” queries.
September 2, 2009, 2:20 pm
What’s Wrong with this Chart?
by Henry Woodbury
The chart, of Federal Spending FY 2009 YTD, is from USAspending.gov, a web site mandated by law to provide the public free, searchable information about U.S. Federal expenditures.
Seth Grimes at Intelligent Enterprise figures out the problem and its cause:
USAspending.gov produces its charts dynamically using the Google Chart API…[but] passes values to Google that are out of range. Google truncates them, just as [its] documentation explains.
Here is Grimes’ corrected chart:
Unfortunately, data misrepresentation isn’t the only problem he finds.
August 27, 2009, 3:09 pm
Craigslist Makeover
by Matt DeMeis
Wired has a very interesting article up right now. Several well known designers were asked to give hypothetical makeovers to Craigslist. I use CL all the time and honestly, I have never really had a usability problem of any kind. It does what it is meant to do quite well and is a true example of a simple utilitarian web service. I don’t own an iPhone or Blackberry so mobile access hasn’t been an issue for me. That seems to be the biggest argument for some kind of partial redesign (if only for mobile clients). A lot of the designers agree “why fix what’s not broken” (myself included) but it’s still interesting to see the results. Some better than others. My take on the submitted designs…
Favorite: Simple Scott
Least Favorite: Studio8
Middle Ground: Khoi Vinh
August 19, 2009, 9:50 am
You Are…
by Matt DeMeis
MIT Phd student Aaron Zinman has created an interesting data driven visualization experiment called “Personas”. Simply enter your name and a Flash app scours the web for bits and pieces of information about you. As it does so, its progress is displayed in visual form (albeit at warp speed, so it’s more for “ooh ahh” factor than usefulness). You are then characterized as a colored strip of categories ranging from books, sports, management and aggression to education, legal and illegal (activities?). It’s an interesting experiment. I think it would be great to have a bit more control over the categories and info about the user. Just to help weed out the cruft. As is, it’s probably pretty inaccurate for someone with the name Bob Smith or Michael Jackson. I am curious what our resident Flash maven Piotr would add to it. Go try it out over at the MIT site.
August 17, 2009, 3:46 pm
Stop Motion Marketing
by Henry Woodbury
This is a response to a D&AD Student Award “bespoke creative brief” by Hewlett-Packard. Titled HP – invent, it was created by Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth.
I just wish it were longer.
July 28, 2009, 12:16 pm
“Both stayed close to the mound where the Eagle set down, except for Armstrong’s quick jaunt over to the rim of East Crater to shoot some photos of the outfield.”
by Henry Woodbury
To provide context for the first walks on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, NASA provides us with a map of the Sea of Tranquility superimposed over a baseball diamond. The Lunar Module is situated on the pitchers mound with the activity of the astronauts indicated as tan paths. This shows a blob of extensive activity around the module and a number of longer walks by each astronaut.
Created by Thomas Schwagmeier from a suggestion by Eric Jones, the map is part of the NASA Apollo 11 Image Library. To really appreciate the details (including a legible key), click through to the full size version.
What looks like the original for the overlay is Schwagmeier’s elegant rendition of the “Traverse Map” — Figure 3-16 from the Apollo 11 Preliminary Science Report. The two maps are shown side-by-side below. As with the baseball overlay, click through to the full size versions to see all the detail.
July 9, 2009, 12:46 pm
How Do You Describe a Design?
by Kirsten Robinson
Last week at Dynamic Diagrams we were working on a new exercise to help clients articulate their design personality for web sites. We were brainstorming a bunch of adjective pairs to describe various dimensions, such as warm / cool, simple / sophisticated, industrial / organic.
Then I came across this story in the New York Times, about a whimsical store called Pylones. One paragraph described the design of the store and its merchandise this way:
If you were to secretly dose the celebrated Japanese artist Takashi Murakami with LSD, spin him around in a swivel chair, bounce him on a trampoline, then repeatedly hit him over the head with a piñata, the interior of this store would be his hallucination.
I really liked this description, but I’m not sure how to translate it into an exercise for clients. Mad Libs, maybe?
If you were to secretly dose [famous person] with [controlled substance], [transitive verb] him/her around in a [noun], [transitive verb] him on a [noun], then repeatedly [transitive verb] him/her over the [body part] with a [noun], your web site design would be his/her [type of illusion].
Anyone care to try filling in the blanks?
June 30, 2009, 1:00 pm
How Tall is the Green Monster?
by Henry Woodbury
Flip Flop Fly Ball is Craig Robinson’s collection of “baseball infographics”:
Essentially, this site is what I’d have been doing when I was 12 years old had the Internet and Photoshop been available to me in the eighties.
What stands out for me from this collection is Robinson’s ability to ask good questions — intriguing or amusing or both.
In some of the work, the question is more the point than the answer. What if baseball players literally stole bases? For more complex questions Robinson often produces just a well-drawn pie or bar chart. But occasionally, Robinson combines question, data, and visual idea into a smart visual explanation that goes beyond that.
For example, the left field wall in Fenway Park is 37 feet and two inches tall. And how tall is that?
May 19, 2009, 11:16 am
Twitter as Public Art
by Lisa Agustin
Check out “Visible Tweets”, a visualization of Twitter intended for public spaces or, as creator Cameron Adams puts it, “a Twitter visualizer for rock concerts.” Simply enter whose tweets you’d like to see, and choose one of three animation styles to see the tweets letter by letter, rotating as they are linked to each other, or as a tag cloud that morphs from one tweet into the next. Adams’ allusion to rock concerts stems from his assertion that Twitter is normally about the chatter that takes a back seat to the main event (but doesn’t have to):
Twitter gives a voice to an audience who for many years have played a subservient role to those who were officially there to speak. But who says they have less to say?
May 18, 2009, 8:53 pm
Logo Fun
by Henry Woodbury
Designer Sean Farrell offers a gallery of logos that incorporate a visual pun or hidden image. Here’s an example:
Pakuy is a packaging company.
April 21, 2009, 8:27 am
Ban Comic Sans?
by Henry Woodbury
Comic Sans didn’t spring to life on its own from the primordial Windows ooze. Typographer Vincent Connare designed it:
…one afternoon, he opened a test version of a program called Microsoft Bob for children and new computer users. The welcome screen showed a cartoon dog named Rover speaking in a text bubble. The message appeared in the ever-so-sedate Times New Roman font.
Connare went to work on creating an appropriate comic font for Bob. Not long after a Microsoft product manager included his creation as a standard font in Windows and the spread of Comic Sans began. The spread of efforts opposed to it soon followed.
Connare retains a wry appreciation for his most famous work:
“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”
March 20, 2009, 2:01 pm
Dynamic Diagrams at Etech 09
by Maia Garau
Last week I presented a tutorial at Etech on Holistic Service Prototyping with Matt Cottam, Jasper Speicher and Brian Hinch of Tellart. This tutorial built on the advanced studio Matt and I taught last semester in the Industrial Design department at RISD on the topic of Service Design. Services are by nature intangible and therefore present exciting new design challenges both in terms of communicating and developing service concepts. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on projects we explored a range of approaches with our students, from customer journeys and service blueprints to video and live enactment. Some of their work is featured here.
In addition to the key concepts and methods covered in our studio, the Etech tutorial introduced tools and techniques for building functional sketch models of web, mobile and embedded service experiences. Participants also played a brainstorming game we created that was partly inspired by Clue (“Professor Plum…. in the Library…. with a Candlestick”). They chose different combinations of users, contexts and tools to dream up new mobile and embedded service experiences, e.g. “Only child… on a road trip…. with an airflow sensor.” We have some video of the session and plan to post it soon.
March 19, 2009, 1:25 pm
An Introduction to Information Design: A Manual for Advocacy Groups
by Maia Garau
Tactical Tech and John Emerson of Backspace have published a useful information design manual for NGOs looking to strengthen the impact of their campaigns:
Information design uses pictures, symbols, colors, and words to communicate ideas, illustrate information or express relationships visually… It is not the same as graphic design, nor is it only about making something aesthetically pleasing. It’s not about branding, style, making a glossy product or something that looks “corporate.”
They add that information design is not about making something aesthetically pleasing, but about making your data clear, compelling and convincing (to which I would add memorable).
The authors make a convincing case for using information design to effect social change at many levels. Information design is a powerful tool not only for storytelling but also for the earlier stages of discovery (finding patterns) and decision-making (making comparisons and weighing options).
Download the pamphlet here or or request a copy.
March 11, 2009, 1:52 pm
Retrobrands, Part 2: The Meatball versus The Worm
by Lisa Agustin
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T Magazine’s recent writeup on the history of the logo for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an interesting counterpoint to Matt’s post on the rebranding of Howe Caverns. In 1959, a year after the agency was founded, James Modarelli of the NASA Lewis Research Center created the NASA Insignia, which was meant to serve as a less formal version of the official NASA seal. The Insignia, also known as “the Meatball,” is a composite of individual design elements — the sphere is a planet, the stars represent space, the vector represents aeronautics, and the orbit represents space travel–cast in a patriotic scheme of red, white, and blue. The result is a logo that looks, to some, too literal and amateurish, yet romantic and nostalgic to others.
The Meatball was used until 1975, when the agency unveiled the NASA Logotype, a subtler, more futuristic take on the agency logo that strips the name down to a single curving element to spell out the four letters. “The Worm” is sleek, serious, and more corporate– not a surprise given it was created by a corporate identity firm, Danne & Blackburn.
Given the history of its logo, one would assume that further work on the NASA brand would take the Worm further along in its progression — more forward-thinking, future-type approaches. Right? Wrong. Turns out that use of the Worm was discontinued in 1992 (although it may be used with permission for commercial purposes), and NASA returned to using the Meatball, which it still uses today as its official logo. Why the return to the earlier version? Columnist Alice Rawsthorn’s take:
The Meatball was revived in 1992 as part of the efforts to revitalize NASA after its traumas of the 1980s. NASA decided to bring back the symbol of its golden age and has stuck with it ever since. The Meatball still reminds us of the triumph of the Mercury and Apollo missions, even though NASA has never recaptured its former glory, as illustrated by its recent problems with the design of the Ares spacecraft system.
Unlike the Howe Caverns brand, in which the old identity was seen as an impediment to bringing in a new audience, the NASA Insignia represents big dreams and new frontiers, a transfusion that NASA’s image could really use right now.
For more on NASA’s logo, see:
March 9, 2009, 8:49 am
Successful Teams Don’t Communicate Only With Words
by Kirsten Robinson
An interesting excerpt from Jared Spool’s blog, on successful design teams and diagrams:
For almost ten years, the research team at UIE has been searching to uncover the secrets behind great designs. As we talk to team after team, a key truth continues to emerge: The best teams communicate internally really well, while those teams that struggle also struggle at their internal communication.
When we think of a team that communicates, the first things that comes to mind are hallway conversations, meetings, and emails. But, as our research continues to show, are only a part of the communication puzzle.
It turns out that one of the differences between the successful teams and the struggling teams is their use of diagrams and maps. Struggling teams almost always try to communicate important design ideas through talking or word-based documents, while the successful teams put a heavy emphasis on diagrams.
It’s nice to see this validation for what we at Dynamic Diagrams have always advocated.
Jared’s comments are a lead-in to an article on concept models, which in turn referenced Bryce Glass’s concept model for Flickr — a nice visualization for a complex social media ecosystem. Apparently this visualization has been around since 2005, but this was the first time I’d seen it.
March 5, 2009, 1:51 pm
Howe Could They Do This!?
by Matt DeMeis
Today I was looking through the list of winners for ReBrand’s 2009 “100 Global Awards Winning Brands” contest, when a familiar name jumped out at me. Howe Caverns. For those of you (which is probably most) who don’t know about Howe Caverns, here’s a quick summary.
In upstate NY there is a HUGE underground cavern that was discovered by a bunch of cows trying to stay cool on a hot summer day. The cave remains 52°F consistently, year round. This makes it an ideal place for aging cheese, beer, getting married and giving tours for money through its long and winding passageways.
My mom grew up not far from Howe Caverns so I have known about it and its wacky, hand painted billboard advertising ever since I can remember. The billboards I remember most depicted a Huckleberry Finn-type character with what appears to be his little brother on his back, lantern in hand, exploring the cavern. The colors were day-glo on black and the fonts were meant to look super spooky!! POW! I was hooked. I had to go there.
My point is it had a memorable style. Like it or not, it got the job done. You would see one of those billboards a mile away and know it was for Howe Caverns. When I saw that Howe Caverns had re-branded itself I was curious, then disappointed.
They did away with the timeless hand painted illustrative style in favor of the “roughen” filter in Adobe Illustrator. The new branding looks like the packaging for a first-person shooter game, or an earthquake danger warning sign. The style is something we’ve seen a million other places these days. Solid color, distressed font, nice photos — done. I feel like the soul and history of the brand just got flushed away. It may have needed a makeover, but the essence could have been preserved.
I am by all means biased due to my personal childhood memories of the brand but I say bring back Huck Finn and his day-glo little brother!
February 24, 2009, 12:40 pm
Global Problems Demand Good Maps
by Henry Woodbury
The study of climate change is a global endeavor which means that data is often plotted to continental or world maps. As such, many of the challenges of good map making reappear as problems in presenting climate change data. Two researchers at the University of Idaho, Jean McKendry and Gary Machlis, point out that a key map from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers (PDF, p. 10), fails in both intelligibility and accuracy:
One of the most common ways in which climate maps can be misleading is to fail to take account of the map’s projection. “All map projections have distortions (distance, area, direction, and/or shape). For example, if temperature is displayed using coloured squares of equal size across the map, but the map projection does not minimize areal distortion, the squares appear to but do not represent equal areas on the Earth,” McKendry told environmentalresearchweb.
Other problems include overlapping data points, a multi-colored data scale, and unclear labels.
The map is reproduced below in all of its orange glory:
January 12, 2009, 10:24 am
Ahead of Our Time?
by Matt DeMeis
I came across this video recently titled “Did You Know” that was created by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and XPLANE. It reminded me of a project dD created almost 8 years prior called “Global Village”. I dug around in our archive and after some careful cross converting and video capturing (the first generation ActionScript didn’t want to play nice), I was able to resurrect the presentation. Some of the sound effects were lost due to the age of the file but it’s enough to show the similarities between the two. It’s not as fancy as the 2007 “Did You Know” but the way the visual statistics are represented has much more of an impact. Have a look…
“Global Village” 1999-2000
“Did You Know” 2007
January 9, 2009, 4:13 pm
A Pattern That Always Fits But Never Repeats
by Lisa Agustin
Computer-scientist-turned-designer Asao Tokolo has developed Tokolo Pattern Magnets, which allow you to interlock the tiles to create a non-repeating pattern that still manages to match the edges of a single tile to its adjoining one. The magnets’ pattern is based on the karakusa, or the Japanese version of the arabesque, which made its way to Japan twelve hundred years ago via the Spice Route. According to the New York Times:
Scholarly papers have been dedicated to the ingenious ways these patterns can be generated and made to interlock and repeat — the fractal geometries of form. What interested Tokolo, though, was the way each tile could have a completely unique shape, and yet be made to link harmoniously to all the others — an unexpected harmony, perhaps, between Western individualism and Eastern collectivism.
January 5, 2009, 12:18 pm
A Short History of the United Nations Logo
by Henry Woodbury
An obituary for architect and designer Oliver Lincoln Lundquist highlights his leadership in the creation of the United Nations logo. The story, as summarized by reporter Steven Heller, highlights the role of serendipity and a shift in point of view:
After the Navy, Mr. Lundquist attended the San Francisco conference at which the United Nations Charter was signed. His team was responsible for designing all the graphics for the conference and an official delegate’s badge, which became the prototype for the United Nations logo. The team did not set out to design the logo for the United Nations, but the badge became the prototype. It was initially designed by Donald McLaughlin, who worked for Mr. Lundquist as the director of graphics for the conference.
The distinctive blue in the design, Mr. Lundquist explained, was “the opposite of red, the war color.” He continued, “It was a gray blue, a little different than the modern United Nations flag.”
The symbol of the globe was also slightly different in the original design, he said: “We had originally based it on what’s called an azimuthal north polar projection of the world, so that all the countries of the world were spun around this concentric circle, and we had limited it in the Southern sector to a parallel that cut off Argentina because Argentina was not to be a member of the United Nations. We centered the symbol on the United States as the host country. Subsequently, in England our design was adapted as the official symbol of the United Nations, centered on Europe as more the epicenter, I guess, of the East-West world, and took into account the whole Earth, including Antarctica. By then, of course, Argentina had been made a member.”
December 12, 2008, 12:17 pm
Creating Guideposts for the Visual Design Process
by Lisa Agustin
A web site’s design is the marriage of the analytical and the aesthetic. The analytical side involves sifting through the front-end research (strategic documents, content inventories, user interviews, etc.), and translating these into a positive and engaging user experience. Coming up with the architecture is a creative activity, but it has its roots in research activities that most clients understand and accept.
Developing the site’s visual design is usually the bigger challenge, since this is when subjective concerns like personal preference may come into play. Personal opinions about design may put the project at risk (read: endless review cycles) if these are not managed correctly. With our projects, we frame design discussions in the context of project goals and best practices. Conversations about the site’s desired look and feel are as specific as we can make them: Are there corporate brand guidelines? Does the site have to complement other sites and collateral? Are there sites you like/don’t like and why? This approach has served us well. Still, there have been exceptions where we’ve created a visual design concept that clearly meets all the requirements, but the client is not satisfied with the result. In the best scenarios, the feedback is specific and actionable. But then there are other design reviews where the response is a little more cryptic: “It’s not quite I was looking for,” or the dreaded “I know it when I’ll see it.” What then?
I thought about this when I read how Droid, the font for the new G1 cellphone, came to be. Google wanted a font that was “friendly and approachable” with “common appeal.” The iterations developed by font studio Ascender Corporation ranged from an early typeface that was considered too “bubbly” to the more “techno” computer-based font, which was also rejected. Because the definition of an “approachable” font isn’t exactly clear-cut (at least to me), I suspect debates about the options used some kind of visual scale, a more complex version of the continuum graphic at the top of this post. Seeing the range of options would be easier than just talking about them, and it would then be possible to pinpoint the desired result. We’ve developed such tools ourselves, adding information about what the advantages and tradeoffs may be in choosing one direction over another.
Another example of this design continuum is the perceptual map used to guide the design development of the Xbox 360 game console (scroll down for the perceptual map). The project team arranged seven console designs on a grid that used “architectural/organic” vs. “mild/wild” axes, with the existing design as a reference. This tool ensured that the conversation was about design language and not about design preference, while also giving non-designers a way to compare the different console designs. (For more on the Xbox 360 design process, see this earlier Information Design Watch post.)
I would love to see more examples of visual tools that can help guide the design process. Readers, have any of you successfully adapted or developed similar tools for guiding design-related discussions with clients?
November 20, 2008, 12:55 pm
Ugly is Timeless
by Henry Woodbury
Jason Fried at 37 Signals offers an appreciation of the Drudge Report:
A couple weeks ago on Twitter I said: “I still maintain the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Has been for years. A few people agreed, but most didn’t. Some thought it was a joke. I wasn’t kidding.”
Fried starts with the site’s “staying power:”
Its generic list of links, black and white monospaced font, and ALL CAPS headlines have survived every trend, every fad, every movement, every era, every design do or don’t. It doesn’t look old and it doesn’t look new — it looks Drudge.
Fried touches on design, branding, production, and content. What is the content of Drudge? Headlines and links. Why is that enough?
The more often you hit his site to go somewhere else the more often you’ll return to go somewhere else again. You visit the Drudge Report more because you leave the Drudge Report more.
Lots of food for thought.
October 23, 2008, 10:01 am
Don’t Eat the iPod Shuffle—Seven Years of iPod Design
by Kirsten Robinson
Wired has published a look back at iPod design, starting with this paper and foam core prototype from 2001:
Check out the article to find out how the scroll wheel evolved over time, when color was first introduced (on the body and the screen), and where the title of this post came from.
October 20, 2008, 9:20 am
Celebrate National Design Week
by Lisa Agustin
This week is National Design Week at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Cast your vote for the People’s Design Award and, if you happen to be in New York City, enjoy free admission to the museum all week.
October 8, 2008, 12:44 pm
Political Word Clouds in Color
by Henry Woodbury
Using the Wordle platform, blogger Ann Althouse created a pair of word clouds from last night’s Barack Obama – John McCain U.S. presidential debate.
McCain’s cloud:
Obama’s cloud:
Althouse makes a profound point:
The most interesting words — like “Jell-O” and “corpse” — were only said once and stay off of their clouds. I’d like a program that makes a graphic of all the words that only appear once. They’re especially… important.
From a design perspective, what’s important is that word color, font, and placement don’t mean anything. Wordle allows you to choose your own colors and fonts for your word cloud and provides a gallery of placement options (horizontal, vertical, half and half, etc.). You can randomize all settings or reposition the words using current settings until you like the way they look.
Althouse is a law professor, but she has an art background and often blogs on art, photography, and the media. She clearly went for an aesthetic result in these two clouds. The McCain cloud looks like the “blue chill” palette, but I think the Obama cloud uses a custom palette, one designed to be different but complementary. Not that that means anything.
August 28, 2008, 11:28 am
Groovin’ with Some Energy
by Henry Woodbury
Here’s an ad that actually caused me to click.
Areva, “the no. 1 nuclear energy products and services vendor in America,” has constructed a new print and Internet ad campaign around the birds-eye isometric view of its world. The Web animation shows energy production and use from mining to power generation to the disco.
It reminded me of the Royskopp video we linked here, but with a somewhat different rationale. Both animations were done by the French firm H5 (look under FILMS > CLIPS for Royskopp; under FILMS > PUBLICITE for Areva).
August 28, 2008, 10:57 am
Infoviz Art on Slate
by Lisa Agustin
Slate offers its take on “infoviz art” via this slide show of visualizations. It includes the usual candidates, like Martin Wattenberg’s famous Name Voyager, as well as lesser-known works like Golan Levin’s The Dumpster, a visualization of blog-documented teenage breakups from 2005, which was co-commissioned by The Whitney Museum’s ArtPort and Tate Online.
August 25, 2008, 9:55 am
Designing a Better Ballot
by Henry Woodbury
Debates about voting access often focus on the way votes are tallied: paper vs. electronic; touchscreen vs. optical scan. But a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law asserts that consistent design and clear instructions are possibly more important than technology:
When it comes to ensuring that votes are accurately recorded and tallied, there is a respectable argument that poor ballot design and confusing instructions have resulted in far more lost votes than software glitches, programming errors, or machine breakdowns. As this report demonstrates, poor ballot design and instructions have caused the loss of tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of votes in nearly every election year.
The report, Better Ballots (PDF), emphatically states the importance of good design — and good design practices, such as usability testing:
Usability testing is the best way to make sure that voters can use the ballot successfully, confident that they actually voted for the candidates and positions they intended to vote for. Usability testing allows election officials to observe individual voters using a ballot — before the election — in order to see where they have problems. This allows election officials to analyze the design and language choices to determine the cause of those problems. They can then redesign and rewrite the ballot to eliminate those problems — before the election. Unfortunately, the vast majority of jurisdictions do not conduct usability testing of their ballots before an election. Of course, all ballots will eventually receive a usability test — on Election Day. At that point, unfortunately, finding out that a ballot is confusing to voters is most unwelcome news.
August 1, 2008, 10:38 am
The Pop Charts
by Henry Woodbury
Recently we came across two sites generating comic pop-culture charts — GraphJam and Song Chart Meme on Flickr. Song Chart Meme is all about pop songs. GraphJam charts pop songs, movies, and the occasional bad joke. Here’s a sample from each.
From GraphJam:
From Song Chart Meme:
July 2, 2008, 11:17 am
The Fun of Getting There
by Henry Woodbury
Illustrator Christopher Niemann offers a wonderful tale of small boys and the New York City subway system. Yes, it’s another post about transit systems. How can I resist.
I myself have taken my motion-obsessed son on several circular ferry boat trips, including the Staten Island Ferry and the Québec-Lévis Ferry (approximate crossing time: 10 minutes).
June 26, 2008, 10:59 am
New York City Waterfalls
by Henry Woodbury
Artist Olafur Eliason’s public art project, New York City Waterfalls, officially opens today.
There’s a lengthy write-up on The New York Times City Room blog, while the project’s elegant Flash-based web site provides background information, photos, directions, and this visual explanation (click on “About The Waterfalls” then “How The Waterfalls Work”):
May 5, 2008, 2:05 pm
Harvard Business Review Discovers “Emerging Science of Visualization”
by Mac McBurney
Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, the two best-known creators of IBM Research’s Many Eyes, brief business execs on the benefits of collaborative information visualization.
Our research has found that the compelling presentation of data through visualization’s advanced techniques generates a surprising volume of impassioned conversations. Viewers ask questions, make comments, and suggest theories for why there’s a downward trend here or a data cluster there. That level of engagement could foster the kind of grassroots innovation CEOs dream of.
The article is available in the May 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review and for free online (at least for now):
You’ll also find Viégas and Wattenberg in MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition.
- History Flow, their 2003 visualization of changes in Wikipedia: http://moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/106
- Thinking Machine 4, by Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, shows a computer’s possible future chess moves. http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/283/
Finally, for even more info-vis star-watching, Viégas and two other designers will join John Maeda (an info design rockstar if ever there was one) later this month for IN/VISIBLE: Graphic Data Revealed. From the event’s blurb:
The visual ethics required in information graphics increase the designer’s burden from faithful executor to editorial arbiter. How do design choices affect the integrity of the data being portrayed?
If you see me there, say hello: http://www.aigany.org/events/details/08FD/
May 2, 2008, 10:02 am
A New (Old) Subway Map
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times City Room blog reports that Men’s Vogue will publish an updated version of Massimo Vignelli’s iconic 1972 subway map:
With its 45- and 90-degree angles and one color per subway line, the 1972 subway map by Massimo Vignelli was divorced from the cityscape, devoid of street or neighborhood names. It was criticized because its water was not blue and its parks were not green. Paul Goldberger called it “a stunningly handsome abstraction” that “bears little relation to the city itself.”
New:
Old:
Part of a continuing series:
April 29, 2008, 12:06 pm
Of Wii and Waterproof Mattresses: Hotels Prototype New Ideas with “Test Rooms”
by Kirsten Robinson
The New York Times reported today that hotels are using “test rooms” to try out new designs and technology before implementing them throughout the hotel, saving vast sums by discarding or improving upon ideas that don’t work. New technologies being tested include waterproof mattresses, digital door panels, customized Wii consoles, and even wireless electricity. But sometimes the greatest need is to make sure the existing features are usable. One guest who tried out a test room commented that he could not figure out the alarm clock or how to turn on the television. “All I wanted to do was watch CNN,” he said.
April 23, 2008, 9:49 am
Charts, Unjunked
by Henry Woodbury
For 100% applied Tufte you can’t do better than the Junk Charts blog. The author, Kaiser, takes charts that appear in mass media venues, analyzes how they go wrong, and redraws them for accuracy and easier interpretation (similar to what we did with Nightingale’s Rose).
Most interesting are the possibilities that arise when a chart has sufficient data to benefit from a variety of approaches. An active comments section provides sophisticated feedback to Kaiser’s posts.
In one recent post, for example, Kaiser redraws a chart of tertiary education by country that originally appeared in Atlantic. The original is shown below on the left, with the first of Kaiser’s redrawn versions on the right:
In the comments, zuil serip links to another set of redrawings, including this one:
March 11, 2008, 9:58 pm
MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind
by Lisa Agustin
At NY’s Museum of Modern Art, the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition “focuses on designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.” The online exhibition features 300 examples of design innovation in several categories, among them Thinkering (“productive tinkering”), Super Nature (technologies based on biological systems), and Extreme Visualization, which includes universcale, a Flash site describing the size of objects in the universe using an “infinite yardstick” extending from a femtometer to a light-year.
February 27, 2008, 1:06 pm
The Movie Money Landscape
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times has a very nice interactive chart on The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 – 2007, partially captured below:
This visual explanation does many some things well. It uses both sides of the horizontal axis to double the amount of data displayed in a vertical slice of time. It avoids unnecessary gridlines and tick marks. It uses color to clarify the area plot for “total domestic gross” allowing easier comparison between movies with short and long runs (compare Shrek to Hannibal, for example). A “Find Movie” feature helps locate any release in the time frame and highlight it among its contemporaries.
All that is missing is a single view of the entire chart. Even a static thumbnail image would help illustrate seasonal and macro trends. Here’s a sample view of 1986 – 1990.
Update: Thanks to commenter “tomp” I’ve made a few edits. My original “double the amount of data” statement was off base. By using both sides of the horizontal axis, the chart may increase the number of peaks, but since the data is stacked (not overlapping as I originally assumed), this technique does not increase data density. The macro view would, in fact, be much easier to analyze if all the data was stacked in the same direction (upwards). I also replaced a reference to The Animal with Hannibal so that my point about total domestic gross would actually make sense.
February 8, 2008, 6:08 pm
Logo Evolution
by Henry Woodbury
From the Neatorama blog comes an interesting exhibit of tech company logos and their changes over time. The companies range from Apple to IBM to Nokia to Palm, offering an engaging contrast between start-ups professionalizing their brand and manufacturing firms reinventing their business. IBM, for example:
February 5, 2008, 11:34 am
Periodic Table of the Imagination
by Henry Woodbury
We’ve seen some unfortunate attempts to use the Periodic Table of the Elements as an organizational metaphor. Here’s a more successful idea — the Periodic Table as communal art project:
Organized by printmaker Jennifer Schmitt, the 2007 Periodic Table Printmaking Project brings together “Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination.”
Many of the artists are users of the handmade craft commerce site Etsy which features a short article about the project in the current issue of its online magazine: This Handmade Life.
January 16, 2008, 12:48 pm
Rate the Flags
by Henry Woodbury
Here’s an entertaining effort to rank the quality of national flags:
To my surprise, there is no international body responsible for upholding simple standards of vexillilic aesthetics. Nor do the UN or Interpol have the power to call in and punish those responsible for such atrocities as the Brazilian or Cypriot flags. I suppose there is probably a conspiracy of rich western nations (those with permanent seats on the UN security council, no doubt) to prevent such crimes from being brought to justice; however, in the meantime I am giving letter grades to the existing flags of the world.
There’s a sound methodology (Rule 1: Do not write the name of your country on your flag), and a list of common failings, leading to grades such as this D minus, for the Falkland Islands:
Writing!
Colonial nonsense
Graven images
Too busy
November 12, 2007, 9:17 am
See for Yourself
by Henry Woodbury
The Laboratory of Dale Purves MD at Duke University has a page of optical illusions and perceptual challenges. Interactive controls allow you to test the “illusion” part of each example while links to the empirical explanations describe why your brain interprets what it sees the way it does.
The website for San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum of Science has a small gallery of similiar illusions, with shorter explanations.
October 16, 2007, 3:53 pm
(T)AXI
by Henry Woodbury
For those interested in logo design, the New York Times City Room blog is offering an extended design revew of the city’s new taxi logo.
The first post describes the design process and features the comments of designers Michael Bierut and Michael Rock; additional posts provide additional designer and reader responses. From the second installment, here’s the take of designer Sam Potts:
The central T is obviously a reference to the subway — too obviously if you ask me — but that is strategically a mistake, as the T.L.C. is separate from the M.T.A. Why equate them visually?
To have the “NYC” touch is, to me, poor craftsmanship, especially with such a blocky typeface. Additionally, as this goes whizzing by, clumped-together letters just get clumpier.
Having said that, my first reaction to this was, “There’s a logo for the taxis?” In fact, the logo is a secondary element in the branding of the taxis — I imagine very few notice the logo but everyone knows what the yellow signifies. I’d even say that the Crown Vic is a more powerful brand identifier (in the parlance) than whatever logo they had or adopted.
Both Potts and fellow designer Oscar Bjarnason note the ill-conceived reference to the city subway logo, a legendary brand we have mentioned before.
September 5, 2007, 10:21 am
Maps, Labels, Politics
by Henry Woodbury
The Economist’s Asia section offers a cautionary tale in the drawing of maps:
Almost any cartographic representation of the continent [Asia] is bound to upset some individual reader or government. Alas, we use maps not to portray the world as it ought to be, or even as we would like it to be, but as it is.
Cartographers, like information designers, seek to visualize accurate data. But what if the data is contentious? Read to the end to find the easy way out.
August 20, 2007, 11:04 am
People Scroll
by Henry Woodbury
In a Boxes and Arrows article titled Blasting the Myth of the Fold, Milissa Tarquini runs through research that shows that browser users really do scroll down long pages. Here’s just one of her examples:
In [a report available on ClickTale.com], the researchers used their proprietary tracking software to measure the activity of 120,000 pages. Their research gives data on the vertical height of the page and the point to which a user scrolls. In the study, they found that 76% of users scrolled and that a good portion of them scrolled all the way to the bottom, despite the height of the screen. Even the longest of web pages were scrolled to the bottom.
My question is this: If people scroll, do we need “back to top” links?
August 1, 2007, 2:07 pm
2007 IDEA Awards Announced
by Lisa Agustin
This year’s International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) show was the latest evidence that design is a discipline that involves more than just aesthetics. Awards were won for service innovation in banking, creating broad corporate and brand strategies, bolstering sustainability via electric cars, and remaking hammers and wrenches in new, better forms. (Shown at left: The instrument panel for the Eclipse 500 jet, whose design team created a user interface that is considered more intuitive, less cluttered, less fatiguing and more motion efficient.) Run by the Industrial Designers Society of America and sponsored by BusinessWeek, the competition boasted a highly international contingent (20 countries total), as well as an increase in the number of student-developed submissions. One particular trend was the rise in environmentally-friendly design, which included some unlikely product categories (green sportscar, anyone?)
A slide show of entrants:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/07/0720_IDEA/index_01.htm
A highlights walkthrough by BW’s Bruce Nussbaum:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/07/0723_idea_awards/index_01.htm
June 30, 2007, 12:12 pm
Simple Physics
by Henry Woodbury
A simple, interactive Flash application at thecleverest.com offers a mesmerizing glimpse into classical mechanics. By adjusting the location of two “planets” and the location and angle of two planes you can send a cascade of bouncy balls flying into space — or into orbit.
It’s like the spare, algorithmic, interactive version of this.
June 19, 2007, 10:56 am
IA and the Agile Approach
by Lisa Agustin
Earlier this month, Fastcompany.com plugged the agile development approach that was used to redesign its home page. The approach in a nutshell, according to blogger Ed Sussman: “Vision, release, test, iterate. Repeat. Quickly.” Speaking metaphorically, think of design and development as a washing machine, not a waterfall. The organization initially planned to release the new design as part of a larger effort that encompassed new features and functionality. But in the end, they decided against it:
What if we had waited to get it all just right before we released FC Expert Bloggers? We’d still be in the dugout. We’d have been guessing instead of seeing what the market actually thinks. In an effort to make our product perfect, we probably would have been forced to spend loads of money fixing problems that might not have mattered to our readers.
The agile approach is one that certainly has its benefits — it’s flexible and means users get to see the latest features sooner, without waiting for an annual update. But in order to be successful, an agile approach still has to start with stakeholder and user requirements that are validated through an information architecture, design, and development process. Only then can an organization be sure its site’s “killer widgets” are truly meeting the needs of its audience.
May 23, 2007, 2:09 pm
Worry Indicator
by Henry Woodbury
For all our focus on diagrams, sometimes illustration is the best explanation.
http://www.bearskinrug.co.uk/_articles/2007/05/17/the_worry_constant/
April 24, 2007, 11:00 am
The Art of Mexican Blackletter
by Lisa Agustin
If you’ve seen a bottle of Corona beer, you’ve already seen a sample of the Mexican Blackletter font. With origins that can be traced back to the Blackletter or Gothic miniscule from 12th century Europe, this font conveys a sense of history and religious tradition. But while it may bring to mind reverential or scholarly images, its use as a multipurpose typeface for everything from shop signs to tattoos makes it a part of contemporary life in Mexico, says Cristina Paoli in her book Mexican Blackletter. Perhaps most interesting is the idea that Mexican Blackletter does not have a fixed appearance, since most of the time it is drawn by hand, usually by someone who is not experienced in typography. As Paoli noted in a recent interview on NPR’s The World:
Most of the time its drawn by hand. And this really has a tremendous impact on the actual shape of the letter. So it makes the whole letter form and its ornaments much more soft and loose. More times than not it’s made by the inexperienced hand of just ordinary people. The outcome is a typographical creation release from the rules and constraints of typography.
To read/listen to the NPR interview: http://www.theworld.org/?q=taxonomy_by_date/2/20070423
To read an excerpt adapted from the book: http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=476
April 16, 2007, 8:28 pm
If Tufte made a music video…
by Mac McBurney
Since I’m on a Tufte jag…
First, frequent commenter EB pointed us to discussion of a vaguely Tufte-esque video. This week our own Matt DeMeis sees and raises with a link to Le Grand Content. What’s next, a Best Parody of Information Design category at the Video Music Awards?
March 7, 2007, 8:49 pm
PowerPoint Gives the Game Away
by Henry Woodbury
PowerPoint despair makes it to the Guardian Unlimited, in this essay by Jonathan Wolff:
What is it about PowerPoint? Perhaps it is the only thrill left to the jaded academic: not knowing whether the technology you are using will actually allow you to give your talk.
While Wolff mocks the dog-and-pony-show marketing of PowerPoint, he focuses on a larger point:
For those who prefer to project the idea that a talk is a unique event, a voyage of discovery that could go in any one of a number of directions, and may well go in all of them, PowerPoint gives the game away. As someone once said: “The art is hiding the art.” With PowerPoint, everything is on display. Elegantly effortless performance is hard enough as it is. PowerPoint makes it impossible.
As another well-known detractor points out, PowerPoint is relentlessly sequential, undermines a presenter’s ability to present rich data in context, and sets up “a speaker’s dominance over the audience.”
I doubt Edward Tufte is going to change his mind, but if Wolff ever watches Steve Jobs at work he might acknowledge that elegantly effortless performance with presentation software is possible.
Okay, so Jobs uses Keynote. But it’s not the software that makes the difference. It’s the approach.
We do a lot of work in PowerPoint. We have two fundamental strategies for creating elegant presentations. First, we approach the entire presentation as a single narrative or composition. Each slide is a storyboard that advances the theme. This lets us leverage PowerPoint’s sequential format to our advantage. We can set up suspense in one slide and resolve it in another. We can establish a motif, then evoke it again and again. We can use pattern and variation.
Second, we treat every slide as a potential visual explanation. Sometimes all you need is text, but with images you can represent concepts, show connections, and evoke emotion. Images also make presenters inherently more interesting. Instead of repeating bullet points on a screen (which people can read for themselves), the presenter speaks to that which the audience sees.
But Tufte and Wolff cannot be ignored. Sometimes the multimedia presentation is simply a bad choice of format. Let us give Wolff the last word. Referring to the power of the image (say, the portrait of a famous philosopher) he writes:
These days, of course, digital pictures of Descartes are cheaper than ten-a-penny, but I’m still unsure of the benefits of showing his bony face to the audience. They have already got me to look at. And if they are looking at me, rather than a screen, I can look back at them. And I can judge whether they have understood what I have just said, and, if not, have another go at making the point.
February 20, 2007, 4:43 pm
Visual Information for Origami
by Henry Woodbury
The New Yorker has a long article on physicist and origami artist Robert J. Lang that also illuminates the dynamically changing world of origami. In short, this ancient artform has changed radically with the application of modern mathematical tools:
In 1970, no one could figure out how to make a credible-looking origami spider, but soon folders could make not just spiders but spiders of any species, with any length of leg, and cicadas with wings, and sawyer beetles with horns. For centuries, origami patterns had at most thirty steps; now they could have hundreds. And as origami became more complex it also became more practical. Scientists began applying these folding techniques to anything — medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA — that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way.
Lang’s personal origami site is rich with images and ideas. For many of his constructions, Lang provides a “crease pattern,” a one-page diagram of singular complexity (see above). Lang explains:
Crease patterns have become much more popular in the last 15 years as a means of conveying origami. Part of the reason is that it’s a lot easier to draw a single crease pattern than to draw a detailed step-by step folding sequence. Part of the reason is that many origami composers (including myself) construct crease patterns as part of their design process, so the finished crease pattern comes ” for free.” And part of the reason is that with the general rise in folding ability worldwide, a reasonable number of people now have the skill to “read” a crease pattern and fold the encoded form.
Further on, Lange expands on his last point:
…a crease pattern can sometimes be more illuminating than a detailed folding sequence, conveying not just “how to fold,” but also how the figure was originally designed. And thus, it can actually give the folder insight into the thought processes of the origami composer in a way that a step-by-step folding sequence cannot.
Lang’s entire essay is enormously interesting for anyone concerned with models, diagrams, and visual explanations. Crease patterns need to show both details and large scale features of a pattern. They may be simplified for readability, or be augmented with additional lines or symbols that indicate key elements of the design. Like a musical score, they are designed for the trained eye but democratically open to anyone who wishes to learn their language.
February 9, 2007, 10:31 am
Strange Maps
by Lisa Agustin
Forget about Google Maps and G.P.S. Here’s one for history and cartography buffs: Strange Maps is a blog covering fictional, hypothetical, and just plain odd maps found online. Image sources run the gamut from the U.S. Library of Congress (for Johananes Vingboons’ “Island of California” map from 1693, below) to the official site of author Stephen King. Besides being a visually-rich collection of approaches to mapmaking, each represents its creator’s view of an alternate reality, whether whimsical (a rendering of the Land of Oz), thought-provoking (the Armed Forces Journal’s re-drawing of the Middle-East), or somewhere in the middle (the world as seen from New York City’s 9th Ave). A bonus: each map comes with a detailed commentary on its background, history, and the occasional factoid for interesting reading.
February 2, 2007, 4:37 pm
New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards
by Henry Woodbury
The 1970 New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual makes for a compelling set of photographs:
The iconic strength of Massimo Vignelli’s signage comes readily through in black and white, but I would think almost anyone who has travelled by New York City subway will think of these numbers and letters in color:
Long ago I jotted down a quote by art collector John C. Waddell from a design article in the New York Times Magazine:
When I think of the East Side, it’s green; when I think of Lincoln Center, it’s red. Massimo and Lella Vignelli did that to my head.
January 25, 2007, 12:54 pm
What is in a Name? The New Apple
by Lisa Agustin
On January 9, Apple launched its latest must-have, the iPhone, along with Apple TV, a device for delivering video content downloaded from Apple’s iTunes service to consumers’ television sets. The same day, the company announced a name change from Apple Computer to Apple, signalling a strategic shift that focuses less on personal computers and more on consumer electronics.
The latest issue of Knowledge@Wharton considers the question of whether Apple’s new strategy will succeed, and how well it will do when competing alongside Samsung, Sony, and Microsoft in the quest to dominate the digital living room. Apple’s talent for design will most certainly be a plus in this regard — not only in terms of the cool-looking hardware it’s known for, but also its ability to make technology user-friendly:
Apple’s design skills go beyond new gadgets to encompass softare design. One of Apple’s real design feats was making it easy for consumers to buy music legally wtihout excessive digital rights managment [DRM] software. [According to Wharton professor Eric Clemons:] “Apple’s iPod and iTunes store are quite tightly coordinated to make theft of content of illicit transfer of content cumbersome. It’s surprisingly easy for consumers to forget why there are restrictions and where the restrictions came from.”
Ironically, this “tight coordination” may also be a stumbling block for Apple:
…Consumers could eventually chafe at Apple’s attempts to vertically integrate is products–and thereby lock customers in– instead of working with other devices. Vertical integration refers to efforts to own multiple parts of a product chain. For instance, Apple operates its iTunes music sales channel, controls the [DRM] software and sells the devices to play content…It’s unclear whether this vertical strategy will ultimately win out with consumers, who may demand support for multiple standards.
While digital convergence has yet to be achieved, from a consumer’s perspective it will be interesting to see the range of products that are sure to emerge while the battle to rule the digital living room wages on.
January 23, 2007, 9:04 pm
The Future of Gesture UIs
by Lisa Agustin
Without fail, the start of the new year gets people thinking about What Will Be Big This Year. The latest issue of Digital Web Magazine features an interview with Doug Bowman, a Visual Design Lead with Google, in which DWM asked which apps from 2006 are most significant and what that means for 2007. Aside from the expected endorsements of Google’s Calendar and Spreadsheets, Bowman had some interesting comments touching upon the themes of selective content sharing (e.g., Six Apart’s Vox) and more consolidation (e.g., Yahoo! Mail).
But what piqued my interest the most were Bowman’s comments regarding “gesture user interfaces,” or UIs that are driven by physical movements of the user. This is not a new thing, of course–dragging and dropping is something that most users accept (maybe even expect) with the latest applications. But recent offerings like the Nintendo Wii and the Reactrix interactive advertising display are giving us glimpses into what user experience may hold for the future. (Okay, so maybe the holographic screen in that Tom Cruise movie wasn’t completely off the mark?) What I find most interesting about gesture UIs is not so much what the final user experience will be for gesture-driven apps, but how would you architect and then document the desired experience? What kinds of description languages will need to be developed to describe the experience programmatically? What kinds of new user input paradigms will emerge moving forward? Stay tuned.
January 8, 2007, 11:07 am
The Secret Weapon of Product Designers
by Lisa Agustin
This month’s issue of Fast Company offers a peek into the DesignAid kit, a collection of twenty inventions with “unexpected properties,” such as impact-absorbing silicon (useful for building a sturdier car bumper) or sound-recording paper (consider a talking postcard). Created by Inventables, the kit changes quarterly and offers product designers a peek at some unusual technologies along with suggestions for various applications. Kit recipients can decide whether any of the offerings might be somehow integrated into their own products, or just use the kit as a source of inspiration for innovative thinking.
January 8, 2007, 10:03 am
Inventing Kindergarten
by Lisa Agustin
As a parent researching kindergarten options, most of the prospective schools offer what you’d expect, a combination of play activities and exploration of some “real school” (e.g., reading, writing, and math). So it was with some personal interest that I visited the Institute for Figuring’s “Inventing Kindergarten,” a look at the original incarnation of kindergarten, as developed by German scientist Friedrich Froebel in the early 19th century. The exhibition outlines the underlying principles of Froebel’s approach, which was “based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation.”
Along with physical activities such as singing, dancing, and gardening, Froebel developed a series of mental exercises that revolved around twenty “occupational gifts,” or what might be considered educational toys today. Cutting and folding paper, weaving sticks, and sewing thread into cards were intended to teach the creation of forms in the real world.
Instructional tools for Froebel’s kindergarten included various pattern books, which are remarkable not only for their intricacy and beauty, but also as they are clearly recognizable as predecessors to design systems we take for granted in today’s digital world.
January 3, 2007, 4:23 pm
Paper Cuts and System Interfaces
by Chris Jackson
Visual and performance artist Peter Calleson explores multiple layers of meaning in his papercut works to explore the complexities between 2D and 3D presentation. I’m drawn to the beauty and cleverness of the works, but I’m most intrigued by how these works exist between two opposites or, as Callesen puts it, between “image and reality.”
I can’t look at Callesen’s papercut works and not think about the intersection between systems and interfaces, how what’s beneath the surface influences what’s above (and vice versa). If you look at one side only, you miss the complexity of the whole. And that’s one of the great challenges in system design.
December 14, 2006, 3:04 pm
Google Wins Patent for Search Results Interface Design
by Lisa Agustin
Those wishing to emulate the Google search results interface may need to think twice: this week the company won a patent for “the ornamental design for a graphical user interface.”
Interestingly, the patent is specifically a “design” patent, which means it covers only the invention’s appearance, rather than a “utility” patent, which covers the functions an invention performs. From an information design perspective, this notion of patenting a “look and feel” begs the question: when is imitating a design a form of flattery and when is it infringement? It depends, according to Phillip Mann, a Seattle-based patent attorney interviewed by CNET:
Google’s competitors need not worry about falling prey to costly lawsuits yet. That’s because it’s typically not easy for patent holders to win suits against alleged infringers of their designs, Mann said. Generally, the legal standard is that the accused infringer would have to employ a design that is “substantially the same” as the patent holder’s.
While it’s easy to guess why Google pursued protection of its design approach, obtaining a patent seems counter to the notion of what the Web is about– sharing and refining ideas, code, etc.. It will be interesting to see what effect (if any) this new protection has–not just on search engine interfaces, but on approaches to interface design in general.
December 13, 2006, 3:02 pm
The Complexity Behind Simplicity
by Lisa Agustin
The idea of simplicity has been getting a lot of press lately, with the popularity of gadgets like the iPod and the release of thoughtful writings by folks like John Maeda. Joel Spolsky offers his own take on the issue, suggesting that what makes “simple” products successful isn’t so much about what they are lacking, but more about what they encompass:
Devotees of simplicity will bring up 37signals and the Apple iPod as anecdotal proof that Simple Sells. I would argue that in both these cases, success is a result of a combination of things: building an audience, evangelism, clean and spare design, emotional appeal, aesthetics, fast response time, direct and instant user feedback, program models which correspond to the user model resulting in high usability, and putting the user in control, all of which are features of one sort, in the sense that they are benefits that customers like and pay for, but none of which can really be described as “simplicity.”
This brings to mind client requests for web site features that look clean and simple, but in fact are quite robust in their functionality. (“Can you make it like Google?”) Making something complicated is easy; making an elegant solution that addresses user needs, business goals, and content requirements–all while offering a positive user experience–is another matter.
November 29, 2006, 11:56 am
Telling Time in a New Way
by Lisa Agustin
Looking for a unique holiday gift? Then you may be interested in a watch by Japanese company Tokyo Flash, whose specialty is creating unique interfaces for telling time. Each watch offers a different kind of visual system: My favorites are the spiderweb-like iPattern, which splits the dial into two halves, the top for hours and the bottom for minutes, or for a real challenge, check out the 1000100101 which–you guessed it–presents time in a binary display. The product page for each watch includes a guide for telling time using your new space-age timepiece.
October 5, 2006, 9:20 am
Photographs by Piotr Kaczmarek
by Henry Woodbury
The new issue of New, the “Irregular Literary Poetry Avant Garde Art Magazine” edited by Dynamic Diagrams’ founder, Paul Kahn, features photographs by our Creative Director Piotr Kaczmarek:
I chose the leafless trees as a subject because I was interested in a clear visual representation of a complex structure; starting from the high level of defined spaces between tree canopies, then the obvious organization of branches, and patterns of twigs. I like the drawing-like line qualities of the subject. What the collages are after is to reveal the fractal nature of these organic shapes.
September 20, 2006, 4:37 pm
How to Generate New Ideas
by Henry Woodbury
Statistician Seth Roberts, “best selling author and paragon of scientific self-experimentation,” is the feature of a link-rich blog post by Tyler Cowen, titled How to Be Happy. What struck me, upon following several links, was Roberts’ interest in idea generation. The “how to be happy” link leads to an unpublished paper titled “Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight.” Even better is the first section of this paper: Three Things Statistics Textbooks Don’t Tell You (PDF). Roberts writes:
Statistics textbooks usually discuss graphic displays of data, but the stated goal is presentation, not idea generation (e.g., Howell, 1999). This reflects the statistics literature, where sophistication and enthusiasm about graphics usually concern presentation (e.g., Gelman, Pasarica, & Dodhia, 2002; Schmid, 1983). Tufte’s (1983, 1990) lovely books, for example, are entirely about presentation; nothing is said about idea generation.
What Roberts found through his own experiments should resonate with anyone who communicates visually:
A major reason for graphing one‘s data [is that a] tiny fraction of one‘s graphs will suggest new lines of research.
Or, to repeat his quote of statistician John Tuckey:
The picture-examining eye is the best finder we have of the wholly unanticipated.
When developing visual explanations we think in terms of the information we want to clarify, the story we want to tell, the audience we want to engage. What goes unmentioned is the fact that moving from text and numbers to visuals can change the way we think about our overall concept. Sometimes a visual explanation suggests powerful alternatives for further exploration. Sometimes we realize that the data doesn’t support the stated goals of the project and a new approach is needed.
While our own process model involves extensive research and analysis, we have learned to begin drafting visual ideas as soon as we have any applicable information to work with. Iterative thumbnails and sketches do more than illustrate the research. They themselves are analytical tools that help us (and our clients) steer clear of blind alleys and drive toward more persuasive, innovative visual results.
September 13, 2006, 12:03 pm
The Magical, Mysterious Design Process
by Lisa Agustin
In this week’s DesignObserver, Michael Bierut muses about how the design process “really” works:
When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people – at least the ones I’ve told you about – have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?
While Bierut’s observation is humorous, it touches upon how important it is for design firms to explain what they do in a way that potential clients (presumably non-designers) will understand, even if it does involve an element of the unexplainable. In the end, the process comes down to starting with left-brain activity (e.g., researching and analyzing), mulling over what you’ve learned in terms of business goals and customer needs, and “transforming” it into a product that will address both.
August 24, 2006, 12:28 pm
The Sketching Collective
by Lisa Agustin
I’m in the midst of crafting an information architecture (IA) for one of our projects. At our studio, doing this is very much a collaborative process. An information architect or analyst comes up with the approach, then works closely with the design team to render this visually using an IA diagram. There’s a translation phase, accompanied by a creative back-and-forth on how best to present the desired information structure.
Oddly, I was reminded of this process by a fun site I came across: SwarmSketch.com. This is an “ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses.” A visitor may contribute a single, continuous line to a titled sketch-in-progress, then vote on the opacity of the existing lines of others to moderate their input. The darkness of any given line is the average of its previous votes.
It seemed a bit like passing around an Etch-A-Sketch.
Probably the best part about it is not the process of adding to the online design or voting on others’ inputs, but the ability to see the progress of the drawing over time. (Be sure to view the gallery of previous drawings. At right: “The Bachelor.”)