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.

So, as we are wont to do, we turned to our monthly Visual Thinking School (VTS for short) and the public to see what kinds of new design thinking could be applied to some old standards.

To start with, we sought to explore the food plate further. Due to its simplicity, the new diagram doesn’t indicate which foods fall under what categories. To remedy this, we did some rapid concepting on a mobile app that would dig deeper into each food group. The group was broken into teams and each team chose a food group.

One team chose the Fruit food group and came up with an app called “Shoot the Fruit.” The app encouraged the user to take photos of fruit. Using the photo, the app would then generate tons of information on that specific fruit: info like preparation, food pairing, recipes, and nutritional information.

See more app concepts on our Flickr stream!
 

So, having gotten our hands dirty with the food plate it was time to take on something from scratch. Again, in groups, we looked at three different, existing graphics: airplane safety guides, food nutrition information labels and the periodic table.

Airplane Safety Guides
The group that worked on this graphic decided that a lot of the information on current safety guides is no longer relevant. This was most evident in the list of devices that are and aren’t allowed during flight. To remedy this, the group designed a new list, both updating the devices as well as distinguishing what is allowed before, during and after the flight.

Food Nutrition Information Labels
As the Food Nutrition Group concepted their design, they came to the decision that the current design doesn’t generate recognition of what the food consists of quickly enough. They set out to create visuals that would be recognizable, at a glance, and would indicate how much of particular component was in the food, and whether that amount was good or bad. An overall assessment of whether the food was healthy or unhealthy would also be given through color-coding on the right. (Think terror alerts, but for food)

Periodic Table
Two groups took on the Periodic Table and both came to the realization that it’s already a very functional design. The main issue was found to be its approachability. Each group tried to make the periodic table a little less imposing by focusing on specific aspects of the information.

One group created a prototype for a rotating periodic wheel, below (I stress the word prototype). The wheel is meant to reveal the information about the elements through an explorative experience. By choosing random attributes of elements, the wheel would eventually reveal what element you’re looking at.

The second group tried visualizing the elements in a comparative fashion, below. Their concept shows the each element represented by a circle the size of which represented its atomic mass.

One member of the group, Alex, went the extra mile after VTS and took the concept even further. Check it out:
The Periodic Table of the Solar System.

Overall, it was an interesting exercise. Reworking familiar design structures can be illuminating in different ways. You’re forced to decide what information seems superfluous and what is vital. A decision that is often informed by what current-day society deems important. Many of the decisions around information for the graphics we were redesigning were most likely made many years ago, when they were originally designed. But over time, the context around them has changed, and the need to reassess becomes evident when you take a good look at them in light of modern day values.
 

Special bonus do-overs:

• Take a look at this sales receipt redesign XPLANEr Susanne LeBlanc found: http://flowingdata.com/2011/07/05/sales-receipt-redesign/
• And Tara Pham of Eleven Magazine sent us a link to a food nutrition label redesign that is a lot like the one our group came up with: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664668/infographic-of-the-day-a-food-label-that-actually-teaches-you-about-food.

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.

Can you imagine how big brands must feel?

It’s more than overwhelming.

The brave new world of immediate social connectivity has exploded and soon it will be impossible to survive as a business without making sense of it. Because all those friends and fans and random people are talking about the businesses they love and hate.

But that’s adding to the noise, isn’t it? And it’s difficult to keep up with, impossible to control, unbelievable in scope.

Signal.

In June Dachis Group launched the Social Business Index (SBI), but unless you were a social media practitioner, a brand owner, or a social strategy owner in one of the Indexed companies, there wasn’t a lot to see.

That changes today. Dachis Group has opened up a portion of the Social Business Index to the public.

The Index is not a white paper. It’s not a 500 page report. It’s not a ‘top 10 tips on social’ blog post. It’s not a set of survey results or prognostication on trends in social.

The Social Business Index is a dynamic, living, interactive lens into real-time social performance, covering over 26,000 brands from over 20,000 companies, including over 100 million social accounts worldwide.

It’s a big deal.

While XPLANE | Dachis Group was not involved in the design of SBI (another of Jeff Dachis’s companies, Bond Art & Science, took care of that), we’re really excited about how visual the presentation of the data is.

There’s a Periodic Table-like breakdown to the high-level ranking information, and simple but clear methods for visualizing business’s community and behavior. As more data is gathered and sorted, I can’t wait to see the new ways we come up with to order and present the information.

Dive in for yourself to see what we’re talking about. Public access is now available at www.socialbusinessindex.com — and brands can register for more in-depth access to the tool.

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.

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 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.

There is one remarkable thing about randomness: Its existence is neither proved nor disproved it even appears everyday in science and in our everyday lives. Random walk is interesting for people who want to know more about the mystic character of this invisible companion.

RANDOM WALK… presents experiments in mathematics and physics, showing the mysterious interaction of chaos and order in randomness. The project RANDOM WALK simulates randomness in visualizations, which are easy to understand. In this way, it delivers insight into a phenomenon, which has so far remained unexplained.

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…”