Design

Designing Data

By August 1, 2012 No Comments

One of the most important roles of a designer is presenting information in a way that is clear and easily understood by the intended audience. When you think about it, this may be the single most crucial thing designers do. It’s at the core of communicating effectively. This coherent visual presentation of information can take many forms, from wayfinding signage in a children’s museum, to user experience design on a mobile website, to making prescription drug containers easier to read for elderly patients.

Data visualization and infographic design has become a developing trend across social design media. The sheer volume and diversity of infographic work on display at design community sites like Visualizing and Visual.ly alone tell me visual data representation isn’t a trend soon to be passé. As information overload increases and our attention span decreases, many think that this type of parsing information will be even more necessary in the future.

Infographics have long been a supporting aspect of journalism by presenting factual or esoteric information in an easy-to-understand format. What would USA Today or the Onion be without their (albeit, amusing) bar charts? With the astronomical surge of information made available to us via the web and new technologies, visualization graphics have become very popular, and much more illustrative. Wired magazine began utilizing this new style of visual data as part of their groundbreaking editorial design in the tech and web magazine market in the late 90s. Good magazine uses infographics so extensively, they have become synonomous with the magazine brand itself. This genre of graphic design has become prevalent enough that design firms have found their niche in solely creating them. Hyperakt, out of Brooklyn, NY, and Column Five Media in California, are two that consistently catch my eye. Posters of information graphics as art can be found on Etsy as well as designer’s personal web stores. Even your resume or LinkedIn profile can be transformed into a pie chart frenzy via Visualize.me.

Invasion of the Drones by Column Five Media for Good magazine.

Of course you can’t talk about all this data visualization without at least mentioning the godfather of it all—Edward Tufte. A statistician and professor emeritus at Yale University, Tufte has written numerous books and essays on information design. Tufte’s infamous criticism of Microsoft PowerPoint as a presentation tool for technical data might elicit chuckles from like-minded graphic designers, but some of his points shoot holes right through the fancy infographics those same designers might create. He argues that PowerPoint uses “chartjunk” to reduce critical data to trivial bullet points and graphs, and that this type of “slideware” favors format over content.

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant.

Tufte goes further to suggest that PowerPoint has dumbed down our ways of assembling information, conducting statistical analysis and deductive reasoning. Not to mention degrading the quality of communication and trivializing the actual material.

So what about these elaborate, beautifully-designed graphics whose entire purpose is a visual representation of precious data? Are designers reducing important statistics to our own form of “chartjunk”—illustrated bullet points and color-coordinated Gantt charts? Granted, PowerPoint is primarily a presentation tool, and serves a different purpose than a well-thought-out editorial illustration. In a way, social-cause designers are making their own sales pitch, without the benefit of verbal explanation. In values-based design, these infographics are a large part of disseminating the need behind the call for action. Visual styling should be secondary to the content, or rather, enhance the organization of the message. Form should follow function, but that doesn’t mean black Helvetica on a white page is the best way to do it. As long as the designer considers the information and presents it in a clear way that tells a story or demonstrates a point of view, data visualization graphics will stay true to their purpose.

 

Author Jami Dodson

Jami Dodson is a designer, writer and thinker with extensive experience in creative services. When not designing or volunteering at greening events, you can find her at the farmer's market or enjoying a manhattan.

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