xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog » Language

“Visual Language for Designers”

Bill Keaggy — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 22:17:59 +0000

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.

Business clichés visual find-it poster

Bill Keaggy — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:20:21 +0000

In case you missed it, last month we sent out our 2009/2010 holiday greeting. Actually, it was more “greeting” than “holiday” — and maybe more “beating” than “greeting!” Why? because we went ahead and poked some fun at a lot of those empty business clichés that get thrown around in meetings, emails and corporate conversations.

So go ahead and download it, hang it up by the water cooler, leave it on someone’s desk… ;-)

Later this month we’ll be sending out an interactive PDF with all of the clichés identified and defined. Sign up for our email newsletter if you’d like to get a copy.

Happy new year, everyone!

Fight the Bull – Why Business People Speak Like Idiots

Bill Keaggy — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:37:51 +0000

“If you think you smell something at work, there’s probably good reason — Bull has become the official language of business. Every day, we get bombarded by an endless stream of filtered, jargon-filled corporate speak, all of which makes it harder to get heard, harder to be authentic, and definitely harder to have fun. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The team that brought you the Clio Award-winning Bullfighter software is back with an entertaining, bare-knuckled guide to talking straight. Grab your cape and sharpen your sword. It’s time to fight the bull!” (Thanks Magda!)

“Marks and Meaning” a new book by XPLANE founder Dave Gray

Bill Keaggy — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:36:15 +0000

“Marks and meaning is a work in progress; an evolving exploration of visual language, visual thinking and visual work practices by the founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. An unfinished work, it’s a hybrid: part sketchbook, part textbook, part workbook, and continuously updated by the author, based on feedback and conversations with readers. This is version zero: the first version available to the public.”

Gene Weingarten – Yanks Thump Sox

Bill Keaggy — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:16:52 +0000

“If you are like I, you are pretty sick of reading articles about how the financially-troubled newspaper industry is making desperation budget cutting moves: Downsizing its products, laying off staff, buying prostitutes for advertisers, and so forth. But believe me, you’d be even sicker of it if you were INSIDE a typical American newsroom these days, where it’s sometimes hard to hear over the 200 decibel background drone of human whining.

One frequent newsroom complaint is that they are cutting back drastically in the use of copyeditors. It’s true, but I for one am not complaining. I say good riddance.”

Goodbye, cruel Word: A personal history of electronic writing

Bill Keaggy — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:36:22 +0000

“For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?”

The Alphabetizer

Bill Keaggy — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:00:30 +0000

The Alphabetizer puts just about any list in alphabetical order with options to strip HTML, ignore case, make all lowercase, capitalize first word, remove duplicates, reverse list, randomize and/or ignore indefinite airticles.

How to Say Nothing in 500 Words

Bill Keaggy — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:33:25 +0000

“Paul McHenry Roberts (1917-1967) taught college English for over twenty years, first at San Jose State College and later at Cornell University. He wrote numerous books on linguistics, including Understanding Grammar (1954), Patterns of English (1956), and Understanding English (1958).”

English Pronunciation!?!

Bill Keaggy — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:02:30 +0000

“If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.”

Yahoo! Design Innovation Team: I. you. he. she.

Bill Keaggy — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:03:49 +0000

“This application example uses live questions from Yahoo! Answers to generate an overall, up-to-the-minute impression of people’s raw feelings and thoughts on the network. Typically such language visualization applications screen out common words, such as our Answers Cloud. When we look at such pronoun words and see how often they are used on Yahoo! Answers, an overall pattern of common meaning and usage emerges.”