xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

Visual complexity is a paradox. On the one hand, complexity is a compelling feature known to capture a viewer’s attention and stimulate interest… On the other hand, complexity only arouses curiosity up to a point. When a visual is extremely complex, viewers may tend to avoid it altogether.

There are a lot of reasons why I really like Connie Malamed’s 2009 book, “Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand.” Here are three:

1. Balance | The book balances examples of great design, explanations of core visual principles and informative bits on cognitive research about how the brain processes graphics. Some pieces you might be familiar with: Nicholas Felton‘s Annual Reports, the HistoryShots series, and Nigel Holmes‘ and Alberto Cairo‘s work all appear here. But a great strength of the book is in the mix of graphics projects you’ve almost certainly not seen before.

2. Context | But it’s not just about infographics. It’s not just about charts. It’s not just about data visualization. It’s not just about posters or maps or illustrations. The book clearly places each of those outputs into context by using specific projects as examples of a key design principle rather than sorting them by deliverable, or style, or date, or provenance or designer. Seeing each piece according to its best qualities is almost better than having an overall project case study. It helps make successes clear and repeatable.

3. Imperfection | The examples shown are not all perfect. In fact, a few are rather bad overall. Some of the more than 250 graphic projects are very specific in their successes and Malamed carefully highlights the thing you should look for. One project might use symbolic icons especially well and another might be a great example of using magnification to highlight important details, while still giving the viewer a holistic view. So just because the font used on a CD cover is, well, questionable, that doesn’t mean we don’t get a look at how nicely the designer combined photography and vector linework to express the motion involved in playing a stringed instrument.

“Visual Language for Designers” is a smart and beautiful synthesis of cognitive science and visual design. It’s scientific but not dull and artistic but not fluffy. I frequently refer to it for inspiration and information.

• Title: Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand
• Author: Connie Malamed
• Publisher: Rockport

Disclosure: Two examples of XPLANE’s work appear in the book – one piece in the introduction and another in the “Make the abstract concrete” chapter.