Brian Williamson came to that VTS. We had been talking with him about the designer position we had open. Afterwards, Brian went home and took that single triangular starting point all the way to the finish line: He made his niece a beautiful book called ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ: An alphabet book of drawings inspired by the simple triangle — and he sent us a copy.

Brian started working with us in our St. Louis office last week.

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.

Someone needs to get me a paper copy of Willard Cope Brinton’s Graphic Presentation (1939), because it is awesome.

Brinton discusses various forms of graphic presentation in the 524-page book and what works and what doesn’t. There’s also some good stuff in there about how to make your graphs, charts, maps, etc (by hand).

The most interesting part is that many of the graphics — despite having no computers in 1939 — look a lot like what we have today. Albeit, they’re a little rougher because they’re made by hand, but that’s just added flavor.

Design has many rules that claim to be big truths and full of wisdom. Designers all go by rules that work for them. However, their rules may not work for someone else, or for a particular piece of design work. When a rule is forced upon you, it stops working and becomes a joke, like “Never use a PC,” or “Leave it until the last minute,” or the most famous of them all, “Less is more.”

The problem is that every rule related to, or governing, design is ultimately ridiculous. In this book we have collected the most talked-about rules and the viewpoints of designers and thought leaders who live by them or hate them.

(Thanks SwissMiss!)

Dave is the founder and president of XPLANE:

I’m a project guy. As an artist, entrepreneur, educator and amateur philosopher, I always have a number of projects going, both personal and professional. Sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes I get bored and abandon them. One of the beauties of the internet is that even abandoned projects continue to exist and can be picked up or reenergized at any moment. Here’s the definitive list of projects that I am working on or have worked on in the past (A work in progress). The list is alphabetical because I don’t work on these projects in any kind of linear way. They are like a busy kitchen: there is always something simmering, something boiling, something set aside to cool for awhile, something in the deep freeze, and something being served. In fact I am still working on this list. If you see something with no explanation it’s because I haven’t finished writing the description yet :)

Looks beautifully simple.

Design books are often expensive and contrary – sometimes the book is worth having for the physical production values alone, sometimes for the images, sometimes for the words and, occasionally, for all three. We wanted to cover those elements in our reviews so that you know whether it’s worth owning.”