Actual Content vs. Perceived Content

A beautiful piece by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit:




[via Brand66]

Zip Code Map

Just a cool little visualization experiment by Robert Kosara over at Eager Eyes:



The map connects all the zip codes in the U.S. (save Hawaii and Alaska; you can view those at the original blog post) in ascending order. Although it doesn't reveal any grand meaning (it shouldn't be any surprise that clusters of zip codes remain within their given state's borders), it is kind of an interesting twist on community, regionalism, and the systems behind aging infrastructures.

Using Design Elements to Support Meaning

Nice example of meaning manifested through a carefully chosen design element:



The postcard above accompanied a magazine insert encouraging breast self-examinations. I'll bet it would have been even more effective had the emboss been of an actual breast, requiring the reader to actually practice a sort of self-exam.



[via directdaily]

Communication Breakdown

When your communication strategies aren't working, you probably identify with one (or more) of the following:

Visualizing the Truth

Not a new project, but a great way to kill your Friday morning:



[visit Indexed]

Earthquake Preparedness Has Never Looked So Good

...Or been so easy to understand. The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management has done an incredible job with this infographic-based website explaining how to handle yourself in the (fairly likely) event of an earthquake. [Edited to add the real credit: I shot him because I loved him, damn him! in collaboration with asketicsf.]



The site is ultra simple, focusing on the six most common places you'll be when the Big One hits. The hilarious graphics (check out the mid-quake hair) immediately get the point across. And the copy follows suit, providing only the pertinent details, making it easier to remember, while throwing in a good dose of San Francisco attitude (when experiencing an earthquake at your local taqueria—how very relevant—you're given the choice between duck-and-cover and "grab your drink—it wasn't cheap"):



After watching the History's Channel's over-the-top-yet-nightmare-inducing look at San Francisco's earthquake history the other night, it was abundantly clear that although San Francisco's government actually has a really good earthquake preparedness plan in place, the city's residents are typically apathetic. The site does a nice job of combining design and copywriting into a short-and-sweet educational piece to break through that apathy.

(And yes, we have a run bag to keep us alive should we need it.)


[via Quipsologies]

Nonsense Infographics by Chad Hagen

There are some of us who get pins and needles from good-looking infographics. These nonsense infographics from Minneapolis-based designer Chad Hagen might make my head explode. Meaningless, yet awfully nice to look at:



Check out the whole set on Flickr - it's worth it.

How are Corporations Going Green?

Thank you, Onion:




(Hat tip to Triple Pundit for seeing it first.)

Write with Intent: Written Messaging in a "Design with Intent" Framework

First, have a look at Dan Lockton's 10-minute slide show on persuasive technology and design with intent, in which he describes various methodologies used to influence user behavior:



As I continue to explore the world of social marketing et al., I've been wondering about the specific role of language in these issues. Designers focus on visual and spacial cues, obviously, and with good reason. There's a strong argument to be made for the idea that modern human language is quickly moving from a verbal core to a visual one. That's a huge debate in and of itself, best left to another post. But there can be no argument that people are becoming increasingly sophisticated information processors when it comes to visual frameworks (that is, we're getting better at deriving meaning from visual cues).

So, where does that leave verbal language? And more specifically, where does that leave the role of persuasive verbal communication? To make this more concrete: copywriters have long insisted that web copy is best served by bullet points, subheads, and other visual means of breaking up text. Shorter sentences and fewer syllables are another way we're encouraged to accommodate this shift in human information processing (since readers are now more used to simply glancing at a screen and immediately deriving meaning from what they see). But is altering the visual appearance of the words the most effective use of verbal language to communicate and persuade (and, ultimately, effect behavior change)?

Using content in addition to form

Often lost in all of this is the actual content. In the case of commercial and social marketing, content is as important an influence as form on a reader's behavior. So if we worry only about the visual appearance of text, we risk failing to provide the meaning it's intended to communicate. It's the effective communication of that meaning that causes a reader to change their attitude or, better still, their behavior. There are several ways writers can increase meaning, and therefore persuasiveness, in their messaging:

1. Avoid passive language, unnecessary modifying clauses, and jargon that may dilute the meaning of your text.
   
2. Acknowledge perceived barriers to behavior change, but emphasize the benefits.
3. Use personalized examples that reinforce the sought-after behavior change (personalized to your reader, not the writer).
4. Integrate a narrative structure that leaves the reader visualizing the process of behavior change.
   

This isn't an exhaustive list. But many of these examples find counterparts in Lockton's presentation above. Number 1, for example, could be compared to the use of unadorned, light-up reminder icons on a car dashboard (a visually active and engaging cue).

Commercial marketers have long understood this, of course (the good ones, anyway). Good social marketers understand it, too (hence the focus on addressing perceived barriers to action). But I'd love to see more academic/theoretical discussion of this within the field. Or maybe it's there and I just haven't found it yet (please point me to it, if you know that's the case). In the meantime, it would serve us marketers well to remember that form and content must work in tandem to effect real behavior change.

Information Overload

Published in: HOW Design Magazine

Information Overload

Once relegated to academic textbooks and snooze-inducing PowerPoint slides, information graphics are suddenly everywhere. Here's what you need to know to create effective infographics in an information-saturated world.

Interactive polling graphs are de facto on the nightly news. Starbucks customers are greeted with poster-sized charts explaining the health care system over their morning lattes. Everyone, it seems, is producing infographics to explain the world around us.

But there's a lurking danger behind the growing dependence on information design to interpret this overflow of data. In fact, the very thing that makes the infographic such an attractive medium for deriving meaning—its exactitude, its ability to represent large data sets, its inherent purposes of elucidation and clarification—can quickly turn into manipulation, depending on who's producing it. This is particularly true now that the lines between education, editorial and entertainment have become blurred. Luckily, designers have a suite of powerful tools at their disposal to combat this.

Understanding Our World

Not surprisingly, the infographic's rise in popularity follows fast on the heels of an information glut. Advanced technology, including computers, has allowed humans to immediately capture, store and analyze huge amounts of information. According to a recent Pew/Internet poll, approximately 73% of American adults now rely on the internet to access this information, which is an all-time high. We're so inundated by data, in fact, that we desperately need a filter for the noise. Infographics allow us to quickly make sense of the political, societal and global complexities that bombard us on a daily basis.

John Emerson, a New York City-based designer and author of the booklet “Visualizing Information for Advocacy," points out that "designers are sometimes curators of—or crafting algorithms to curate—the stories in the data." These stories form our worldview, one based on our right to access information. But this access depends on accurate data; our understanding of the world is only as reliable as the information we get.

So the graphic designer becomes a filter of this data, arranging it in a visual form to be used by real people to understand their world in meaningful ways. Traditionally, we've turned to information from editorial publications, advocacy groups, and institutions like schools and government for such data. But when the corporate coffee shop provides education about immigration and the economy, it's time to recognize that the graphic designer plays a critical role in information analysis. "The point of analytic design," said information design guru Edward Tufte in a 2004 interview, "is to assist thinking." Given what's at stake, it's up to graphic designers to assure their visual analysis is both honest and accurate.

Saving Lives

In 2007 there were an estimated 281 billion gigabytes of data on the internet alone. By itself, each individual bit of data amounts to nothing more than a single grain of sand. It's what we do with this data that matters. Infographics gave meaning to our world long before computers, of course. Students of Tufte may recall his description of a particular evening in 1854, when a deadly cholera epidemic swept through London's SoHo neighborhood, killing several residents.

Within three days, almost 200 people were dead. Within 10 days, more than 500. Little was known about the cause of the outbreak; medical theory at the time assumed that cholera was an airborne illness. But Dr. John Snow had a hunch that cholera was transmitted by contaminated water rather than air. As the epidemic spread unchecked, Snow paid a visit to the city's General Register Office, where he gathered the locations of the cholera deaths, then sketched out each and every death over a map of London. When he was done, a dramatic pattern had emerged.

On Snow's map, at the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street—surrounded by dozens of darkened rectangles, each depicting an individual death—was a water pump. The concentration of deaths around this particular pump revealed it as the source of the outbreak. His map was clear enough to convince the town to remove the pump's handle, and within days the number of cholera deaths dropped dramatically. Snow's graphic representation of the outbreak gave public leaders a new way to understand the information. Without the map, there would have been little evidence of the true cause of the disease, and thousands more would likely have died. Data, Snow demonstrated, is meaningless without form.

So how does a designer know what form to give his graphic? Snow began with good data, a practice recommended to this day by seasoned information designers like Steve Duenes, graphics director for The New York Times. "The graphic's mission is determined by the data in the same way that a story is written based on information the reporter has gathered," Duenes says. "If you don't find interesting or complete information, no amount of design virtuosity will make up for that." Good data comes from reliable sources, is up to date, uses consistent units of measurement and is, above all, complete.

The Shape of a Data-Driven Story

Duenes' advice to let the nature of the information lead the design is echoed among his colleagues. Charles Blow, who once held Duenes' position at The Times and is now the paper's visual op-ed columnist, says he won't start designing an infographic until he sees the data. "When I see the data, I can see immediately how it should work," he says.

The information designer must therefore have a large repertoire of graphic formats from which to draw. Blow encourages information designers to constantly add to that repertoire. "You have to build a library of forms in your head, hundreds and hundreds of graphical forms, and when you study those forms, think about what data went into them and how wide the range of the data is," he says. This way the designer can easily recognize the story the data is telling him, rather than forcing his own interpretation onto it and potentially obscuring its true meaning.

Hidden Dangers

Like all graphic design, information graphics derive their meaning from an arrangement of visual cues. In "Visual Explanations," Tufte suggests that "clarity and excellence in thinking is very much like clarity and excellence in the display of data. When the principles of design replicate the principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight."

In information design, less is almost always more—more communicative, more meaningful, more powerful. Tufte points out that less (and, therefore, more) can be achieved using multi-functional elements. Force a single dot, line or word to communicate more than one meaning, and the viewer spends less time interpreting and more time understanding. Or, as Blow puts it, "Start with the least amount of strokes."

Even Blow, whose op-ed role at The Times behooves him "to not be objective," is careful to avoid factual distortion or misrepresentation. "It's very easy to twist statistics and make the charts say whatever you want them to say," he says. "That impacts the credibility of the text, and the column as a whole. It impacts my credibility, it impacts the credibility of the newspaper." This twisting of statistics occurs most often in relation to a graphic's scale, or when making adjustments for considerations like inflation. "You can adjust data to death," he warns, so do so with care.

When faced with such decisions, it can be helpful to return to the graphic's guiding story to determine the design approach. In addition to the sheer quantity of information, you must thoughtfully consider issues of scale, contrast and typography to produce an effective and responsible data graphic (see "7 Practical Tips" for details [download the PDF to view]). When the designer forgets to apply this kind of methodical thinking to a graphic, it leads to what Blow calls acts of beautiful confusion—heavily designed graphics that focus more on aesthetics than meaning. "They look amazing to me, but I have no idea how to read them," he says.

Designing for Impact

Beautiful confusion may be an inevitable side effect now that information design's popularity has caught up to the technology available to create it. But there's another trend that relies on simplicity and elegance, rather than bells and whistles, to further meaning and engage the audience. The most obvious example of this might be GOOD Magazine, with its regular Transparency section devoted to “a graphical exploration of the data that surrounds us." Casey Caplowe, GOOD's creative director, says that when you take the time and energy to synthesize complex information, you can learn amazing things.

Caplowe readily admits that the magazine takes an “artistic, sometimes risky or experimental approach to it. And sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail." But, he adds, “This is not just about how you simplify things, it's about how you communicate effectively." This is born out by the fact that the Transparency section is the most well-known, and commented on, section of the magazine.

This kind of engagement, of course, is often what leads to action. This was the goal of Tactical Tech, a non-governmental organization working to empower human rights activists through technology, when they called on John Emerson to produce "Visualizing Information for Advocacy," a 43-page primer written for nonprofits and social advocates.

Executive director Stephanie Hankey says, "So much hard-earned, evidence-based campaigning work goes to waste when it's dulled by poorly designed charts and graphs, and buried at the back of obscure reports." "Visualizing Information for Advocacy" teaches social advocates how to design infographics that effectively communicate the human impact of the data being illustrated. The booklet aptly demonstrates how sound design principals help an infographic resonate with the viewer.

In today's world of unending information and crossover media, these principles of responsible representation hold true for any infographic. But as with Snow's cholera map, the results can sometimes mean life over death. When citizens literally put their lives at risk to collect data about human trafficking, for example, the chart that ultimately displays that data takes on new significance to readers, who might then be more inclined to donate money, volunteer, change their worldview or simply bear witness themselves.

###

Feel free to download the full PDF with graphics and formatting, and additional sidebar (423kb PDF).

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?