Back in June the federal government unveiled a newly designed visual to replace the Food Pyramid many of us are familiar with. Rather than simply showing us what each food group is, the new graphic also is meant to give us an idea of proper portion control of each food group. Shaped like a plate (and cup for the milk) the graphic is very simple, especially when held in contrast with the food pyramid.
This change prompted us at XPLANE | Dachis Group to take a look at a few other long-standing charts, graphics and diagrams and ask whether they could use a bit of sprucing up.
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Noise.
The web’s full of it. And social has dramatically increased it because so much can be said so quickly and so easily, from anywhere, by almost anyone. But social connects us — and a lot of us think of it as a purely personal experience. Friend to friend, person to person, fame to fan, etc. As individuals we struggle to make sense of it all as we juggle Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts, friends, contacts, comments and feeds.
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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.
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A quick roundup of some recent information design projects seen around the web:
Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to do client work on an infography, but it seems to be one of the most challenging task for a graphic designer. The perfect infography must synthesize complex information in a simple visual representation, which is not easy. The following examples take information architecture to another level by making it beautiful.
FlowingPrints, brought to you by Nathan from FlowingData:
FlowingPrints posterizes the hidden stories in data.
Not only are we creating more data every day, but data is growing more widely available from governments, organizations, and individuals. Big databases are just the first step though. We need to make sense of it all.
Enter FlowingPrints. As a project of FlowingData, FlowingPrints analyzes, interprets, and visualizes the meaning behind the data. The final result: posters that present beautiful stories in beautiful data.
FlowingPrints will announce whenever a poster is ready, and that poster will be available for a limited time. While previous posters will be digitally viewable in archives, only one poster will be on sale at any given time.
“This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It’s a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, develop and share tools together, and begin to integrate their particular projects.”
Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 11:16 am
“The recently released book ‘Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design’ available at Amazon.com and Gestalten.de seems to be an ideal Christmas gift. The book introduces an expansive scope of innovatively designed diagrams, and presents an abundant range of possibilities in visualizing data and information. These range from chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to extremely complex three-dimensional diagrams.”
“Here’s one thing that’s making me angry at the moment. In fact there are several things making me angry at the moment: McCain’s supporters; the greed that lead us into these financial end-times… and by comparison this particular matter is trivial. But at least it’s easier to solve than the others.
This particular annoyance is the graphs of share prices in the press and on TV. It is standard practice to start the y-axis at a number much higher than zero, in order to magnify the ups and downs of the market. Here’s one from today’s Guardian, showing the FTSE 100 over the course of Friday…”
Last week was the end of our FlowingData personal visualization project. I asked readers to collect data about themselves or their surroundings and then visualize it some way. Thank you to everyone who participated. It put a smile on my face every time I got an email with ‘summer project’ in the subject line :).”
Beautiful:
