“Take a folded sheet from the newspaper…”

“There is little doubt that Information Design gets short shrift. It just isn’t considered very sexy. However, I am refreshed that when talking to classes of students about it as I have done over the years, there is both amazement that it exists at all (they had never been told about it in any way that had engaged their attention), often followed by profound interest and excitement. Sown in the right soil these concepts can flourish and give meaning and direction to study and provide real and worthwhile goals to strive toward. Information Design presents a similar opportunity to those designers who have been practicing for some time and who might cherish the chance to broaden their horizons and have some more demanding destination toward which to aim. And the challenge is profound. On a daily basis, we are all confronted by misleading or garbled information all around us and assaulted by mind-numbing brainloads of gibberish every time we log onto the Web. As a designer, you are presented with the clear opportunity to take action and carve some kind of path of clarity through all this stuff.”

“Looking ahead to this year’s [Industrial Designers Society of America] convention in Boston, where more than 650 creators will gather tomorrow through Saturday, influential designers were speaking with one voice. After a decade of live-wire, cutting-edge creativity, they were talking up simplicity, humanism and grace. The words are as soft as the economy, but the thought behind them has plenty of bite: The American design revolution is off course.”

“There is little doubt that Information Design gets short shrift. It just isn’t considered very sexy. However, I am refreshed that when talking to classes of students about it as I have done over the years, there is both amazement that it exists at all (they had never been told about it in any way that had engaged their attention), often followed by profound interest and excitement. Sown in the right soil these concepts can flourish and give meaning and direction to study and provide real and worthwhile goals to strive toward. Information Design presents a similar opportunity to those designers who have been practicing for some time and who might cherish the chance to broaden their horizons and have some more demanding destination toward which to aim. And the challenge is profound. On a daily basis, we are all confronted by misleading or garbled information all around us and assaulted by mind-numbing brainloads of gibberish every time we log onto the Web. As a designer, you are presented with the clear opportunity to take action and carve some kind of path of clarity through all this stuff.”

“Comics is a medium founded on constraints. Our very sense of what a comic is-whether a newspaper strip, Sunday page, comic book or web comic-is to a large extent determined by formal characteristics or constraints. Strip length, page size and layout, panel borders, word balloons, decisions about drawing style: these and many other formal considerations are the building blocks from which we create all kinds of work. The project of Oubapo (Workshop for Potential Comics) is to identify those constraints that already exist (2 common examples: using a 9-panel grid, or using a fixed point of view, as in a monologue comic) and to propose and implement new constraints that can generate new comics.”

“Focus groups, brand image, and other staples of modern advertising all sprang from the work of a group of Chicago social scientists. These pioneering market researchers used tools from psychology, anthropology, and sociology to study a once-neglected topic: why people buy stuff.”