Doesn’t it seem like life is moving faster and faster every day? We’re always moving from one fire to another and we become consumed by pressing deadlines and client satisfaction, while giving little thought our own mental health.
This week for our Visual Meditation, let’s take a few minutes to think about the things that make it all worthwhile and bring relief from the craziness.
Think about the things in your life that make you happy.
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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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At XPLANE we love to draw. In fact, our entire approach relies on drawing as a means to get people thinking, talking and sharing so we can better understand all the information that resides in their heads — or in an organization or elsewhere.
Visual language is a very powerful way of doing that because words can be deceptive. Pictures however, can be universal and help bridge those communication gaps. As our founder Dave Gray says “If it can’t be drawn, it can’t be done.”
Even prehistoric people used drawing to communicate and to understand their world. They used cave paintings to develop strategies and maps for hunting buffalo and finding water, or simply to relate to their world. Our ability to draw is innate. Every five-year-old in the world knows they can draw, enjoys it and will not hesitate to show off their abilities — sometimes on walls! The problem is that as we get older we talk ourselves out of drawing because we’re not as good as we think we need to be — or we’re told that “that’s for kids.” So even though it’s fun and can be very therapeutic, we’d rather not be embarrassed about it so we let it go.
Well, forget all that. We want to encourage all of you to draw and we have some simple exercises that we think will help get you going. Let’s call them “Visual Meditations.” They are short, weekly drawing exercises developed to encourage visual thinking and to reignite your innate ability to draw and communicate with pictures.
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So a friend came over tonight. We hadn’t talked in a while, and he wanted to meet the baby, and so we talked and ate and some small and great things were exchanged, including two books. For the baby there was The Monster at the End of this Book, and he took our copy of Vonnegut’s Bluebeard.
How this is relevant to visual thinking involves a couple hops, but it seems natural to me:
Kurt Vonnegut wrote. He wrote 14 or so novels, an equal number of collections, and some plays. He was good enough at it to make it his profession. And of course he left a lasting mark on the pliable morality of many teenagers who were lucky enough to have his books on their summer reading lists. He did this with words.
But he also drew stuff. Although I struggled tonight to remember the plot of Bluebeard (what was the fate of Rabo Karabekian’s secret?) what will forever be burned in my brain is Vonnegut’s glyphic resampling of the asterisk. I remember meeting it at the bottom half of a right-facing page in the early pages of a paperback book, and it’s been in my head ever since.
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Lots of quick tips, trick, profiles and samples over at Storyboard Central.
Part ‘History of’, part showcase, part bitch fest… a place for those interested in the fine art of the comp and storyboard — especially as they are used in advertising.
The acquisition was announced this morning — this is exciting news for all of us!
More info here: Dachis Group acquires XPLANE and be sure to check out the buzz on Twitter.
Youngme Moon of the Harvard Business School collaborated with XPLANE to create this video introducing her new book, DIFFERENT, an intimately drawn meditation on the meaning of business differentiation.
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!
I love these funny graphics — they’re kind of like a cross between Goopy and Indexed.
Be absolutely sure to check out Mindmapping.
(Via Chris Glass)
For the second time in recent months XPLANE has partnered with The Economist to create a compelling video on a topic of global importance. After working together on “Did You Know? 4.0”, The Economist enlisted XPLANE’s visual communication expertise to develop “The Carbon Economy” about the growing importance of climate change and green technologies and solutions.
“The Carbon Economy” will be shown at The Economist’s upcoming Carbon Economy Summit on November 17 and 18, 2009 in Washington, D.C. The video is three minutes in length and includes simple visuals and a moving soundtrack to clearly convey the troubled state of global climate change and what steps must be taken to reach a positive outcome. The production was created using Apple’s Keynote software.
For more information on The Carbon Economy Summit, visit http://carboneconomy.economist.com.
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
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