Perhaps the Most Important Info Graphic Ever

How to nap:

(via SFist)

Flags of the World: What They Really Stand For

Here's a striking ad campaign for Grande Reportagem making the rounds. It features lush yet no-nonsense representations of various country flags, with a small map legend inset in each. Reading the copy reveals a much larger truth than the viewer was likely prepared for. It's everything I love in (information) design: subtle, commanding, and quietly thought-provoking.



The campaign comes from Draft FCB Lisbon.

Great Resource! Information Design for Advocates and Activists

If you think charts and graphs are sexy like I do, download this booklet immediately. And if you think charts and graphs are evil necessities that you must use in the execution of your social justice campaign, public messaging plan, marketing strategy or whatever you need to call it, download this booklet immediately.


Click above image to download the PDF booklet.

"Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design is a booklet...designed to introduce advocacy organizations to basic principles and techniques of information design. It’s full of examples of interesting design from groups around the world in a variety of media and forms. It has tips, excercises, and even recommended Free Software packages to help polish up your graphics."

For only 25 free pages of text and graphics, this little publication packs a wallop. It's good to see something along the lines of Edward Tufte become a bit more approachable and digestible. Big ups to John Emerson and his contributors for sharing their skills.

The Key to Readability

David Carson and Raygun aside, publications rely on their readability for success. Smashing Magazine's collection of outstanding newspaper designs offers a peek into what makes a paper readable.

As it turns out, there are some essential commonalities to the selections:

• White space rules: With text-heavy presentations, it becomes necessary to give the eye room to move and absorb all it's taking in. White space not only helps relieve the eye, but leads it across the page and can even build hierarchy.
• Strong graphic placement: The most successful examples in this collection treat each graphic as part of a larger whole, rather than slapping images into the layout willy-nilly.
• Heavy reliance on grids: It shouldn't surprise anyone that a well-designed grid will keep elements properly proportioned, related, and ordered.

These elements help guide the reader through the meaning of each individual article, while creating an organic movement through the entire newspaper. It's a nice collection.

[via Drawn]

Social Justice is a Numbers Game

If it weren't for teachers, this country would be seriously screwed.

"Radical Math Teachers are educators who work to integrate issues of economic and social justice into our math classes, and we seek to inspire and support other educators to do the same.

We believe that math literacy is a civil right, and that our nation's failure to provide students, especially low-income youth of color, with a high-quality math education, is a terrible injustice...

We encourage our students to ask the question: 'What are the problems that my community is facing, and how can I use math to understand and help solve them?'"

[via Social Design Notes]

Furoshiki: Wrapping packages with a single piece of cloth

Pretty cool bit from Japan's Ministry of Environment:

Calendars and usability

Elzr.com issued a challenge: submit any design for a full-year calendar that fits a standard business card. That's 2" x 3.5" of timely joy, ladies and gentlemen, and no easy task. There were some elegant solutions"



And some other solutions that may have solved the specific problem, but failed to look at context and usability:





It's all well and good to innovate, but if you're working with something as universally familiar as a calendar, the user still needs to be able to look at it and know how to use it. (That's why, for example, Target's redesign of the prescription pill bottle was so elegant; it made a universally recognizable object even easier to understand.)



[view all calendar submissions at elzr.com]

The Project

When was the last time you worked on a project that felt like this?



Sure, it's an awfully cynical look at what should be a well-oiled process. But the above results are entirely avoidable by dropping the egos, working within acknowledged limitations, remaining open and flexible, and skipping ahead to the last panel.

Create your own at TheProjectCartoon.com! [via Freelance Switch]

How does your language define your future?

The Aymara language reverses past and future by referring to forward-occurring events using language denoting the past. Huh? Simply put, Aymara speakers do not subscribe to the same past-present-future tenses that almost the entire rest of the world does.

Just imagine what it would be like if your future depended on your past, and the only way you could communicate "will" or "want to" was to speak as though you already "had" or "did."



When we communicate with one another—be it in words, pictures, or hand gestures for that matter—we make some basic assumptions. We assume the other person is parsing our message the same way we would. We assume that the other person believes in a chronological past-present-future, connects the dots the same way we do, implicitly understands what the hell we are talking about.

But this isn't always the case and our assumptions often cause our messages to fall not on deaf ears, but simply different ears. Or eyes—let's take another example: about 10 million people in the U.S. have difficulty distinguishing red from green (a simple form of color blindness). What does that mean if you are a mapmaker and you color two neighboring countries red and green, respectively? Or if an architect uses these two colors to signify where load-bearing columns should go? These are unlikely examples, of course, but they demonstrate how imperative it is to consider our assumptions about the viewer.

While most of us don't encounter many folks like the Aymara, we still must carefully consider our messages and how we deliver them to others. Whether we're exchanging pleasantries with the coffee shop clerk in the morning, talking our way out of a speeding ticket on the freeway, or teaching surgeons how to handle a scalpel, the words and images we use to convey meaning may have a much different effect than we anticipate.

So don't let assumptions about your audience ruin your chances of communicating your message. Think about how they process information, what they value, how they speak and read and write. Just think about them and then worry about how to say what you want to say.

Coffee, tea, or me: flavor wheels

Taste is an interesting thing: most of what we taste is actually smell. Every food produces different molecules, known as esters, that interact with the nerves in our nose (Those hairs up there? They have nerves!), causing us to perceive different smells and tastes.

On top of that, the taste receptors on our tongue also help out; there's lots of crazy little scientific experiments going on inside your mouth at any given time. So without further ado, I give you a few examples of how these smells and tastes have been classified depending on what it is you put in your mouth.

The last one's the kicker.


The Coffee Flavor Wheel:



The Beer Flavor Wheel (Mielgaard):




The Wine Flavor Wheel (Noble):




The Devil's Flavor Wheel (Rowe):

Map Love: I Didn't Do This In Grade School

Give this real quick map game a try. Seems like a great solution to the shortage of maps in South Carolina.

How PowerPoint Took Down the Columbia Space Shuttle

I don't build PowerPoint presentations as a general rule, but not for the reasons that many of my colleagues avoid same. While many designers absolutely despise PowerPoint for its ungodly design limitations and cheesy effects that are inevitably overused by presenters, I avoid it because I think it's senseless overall.

By senseless, I mean that the information provided within a PowerPoint presentation, as well as the method of presentation itself, is better achieved through other means. That is: not only are the graphic representations allowable via PowerPoint too often ineffective, the delivery method is ineffective, and the very existence of a PowerPoint slide too often renders the human presenter ineffective, too. Therefore, all of the information contained within any given PowerPoint slideshow can and usually should be delivered through more appropriate means. What are those means? Simply, they are:

• The speaker's own words
• Printed handouts for later reference
  

Maybe, you say, if the PowerPoint slides were nicely done, they'd have more of an impact. This is true, to a finite degree. What constitutes "nicely done?" I'd include:

• Relevant content
  
• Quiet graphic elements that don't intrude on this relevant content
• Logical progression

But then you're faced with the problem of what the presenter and the audience each do with the content of each "nicely done" slide. Does the presenter read the slide verbatim? Usually—thereby negating the need for the slide in the first place. Does the audience read the slide while the presenter is talking? Usually—thereby by negating the need for the presenter.

Which leads us to: the use of an abbreviated medium such as a slide to deliver a content-rich message is inevitably damaging to the message itself. PowerPoint typically leads the speaker to reduce his message to a series of bullet points. The speaker's elaboration on each bullet point—if provided at all—is often lost to note takers, slide scanners and the spaced out. In such cases when the PowerPoint presentation is turned into a PDF file and emailed off to the audience after the presentation, all of the speaker's elaborations and nuanced points are gone, forgotten.

Edward Tufte, god of information design, goes a step further than myself:

George Orwell's classic essay 'Politics and the English Language' gets right the interplay between quality of thought and cognitive style of presentation: 'The English language becomes ugly and inaccurate because of our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.' Imagine Orwell writing about PP: 'PowerPoint becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of PowerPoint makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.'" [Ask E.T.]

Which brings me to how PowerPoint took down the Columbia Space Shuttle. Tufte is renowned for his analysis of a particular NASA PowerPoint presentation, in which he argues that the PowerPoint presentations—28 slides in total—used to assess the safety of the Columbia were inherently flawed thanks to the bulleted-list format (PowerPoint's fault) and lousy choice of language and progression (presenter's fault).

The analysis is fascinating and well worth reading in its entirety, as it describes many of the nuanced ways in which PowerPoint quietly destroys the messages it delivers. Why shoot yourself in the foot by using a medium that necessarily simplifies, omits and distorts the very thing you're trying to communicate?