Posts Tagged ‘information design’
Thursday, November 29th, 2012
Cap’n P. points from somewhere in the well-designed future to the inadequate user experiences of the early 21st century.
You might think that by now we would be getting to grips with the information age and that with endless data literally at our fingertips that certainty and progress would follow. The reverse seems more true. The combination of sheer data volume and vested interests make it harder than ever before for us to separate signal from noise.
The human mammal, supposedly superior to corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods (and other smartarse earth life forms not beginning with ‘c’) has built its success so far on exceptional pattern recognition skills and an aptitude for making sense of complexity. But more often the widespread response to our self-inflicted Infogeddon is a toxic combination of ignorant denial and rampant egomania, most obviously illustrated by (though far from limited to) rightwing US politicians and widespread fundamentalist religious groups. It often works: state your case firmly, loudly and often enough and like rust or some fungus, the maddest ideas take hold. Add power to such posturing and you can take any barking notion and Make It So (as I understand slaphead space commanders of the future will be fond of saying).
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Tags: branding, communication, graphic design, information design, social responsibility
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Friday, August 31st, 2012
The 1950s new town dream: envisioned, achieved, forgotten.
“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” (Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus).
Some of us avoid ruining clothes by checking washing instructions. Fogeys young and old appreciate looking after a good pair of shoes. Some humans may have read a few pages of the user manual that came with their car / TV / computer. But most of us pay scant attention to looking after stuff. Our high expectations and short attention spans have made ‘care’ a tiresome inconvenience.
Architects, designers and other creators are blamed when their enduring work ‘fails’ in the long run. Poorly maintained 70s buildings routinely get torn down where a little care might have preserved the optimistic social statements they once made. The City of London’s Barbican Estate is a rare exception to the rule.
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Tags: accessibility, communication, creativity, design process, industrial design, information design, maintenance, Stevenage, vision
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Thursday, July 5th, 2012
For something like a quarter of a century, Stanley Green was a familiar feature of the tawdry landscape of London’s Oxford Street. Anyone shopping there between the late 1960s and the end of the 80s is likely to have seen him, his placard and self-produced booklets. I worked with Sedley Place Design for much of the latter decade in the alley off Oxford Street that gave the company its name and Stanley was as much a part of that time and place as the three-card trick, IRA bombs and cheap Italian restaurants. If my colleagues and I admired his eccentricity and outsider typography we ignored the dietary advice in his distinctive monotone and hand-painted caps: ‘LESS PASSION FROM LESS PROTEIN…’
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Tags: communication, information design, typography, visual culture
Posted in blog, education, information, inspiration, publication | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Nokia Lumia Windows phone (photographed badly on an iPhone)
Jonathan Ive’s tenure at Apple has produced a long, successful sequence of product design revolutions leading to the touchscreen interface. It is now so dominant that physical design is arguably being usurped by graphic design as the driver of functionality. Apple’s record in graphics is mostly strong (I always liked their instruction booklets) but recently they seem less sure-footed.
iTunes is much harder work than it used to be (and its ‘new logo’ was widely disliked); the iCal leather / stitching effects are retro and retrograde. Even the ‘candy box’ iPhone / iPad apps homescreens, once fresh and friendly now seem more irritating than helpful. The iPhone remains a beautiful piece of work (even if its most impressive features – like the beautifully machined, spookily high-tolerance sim card tray – are hidden from view by the bumper required for practical everyday operation), but sentimental airbrush effects are starting to make Apple products seem behind the curve for the first time. This was thrown into sharp relief for me by the wife’s new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (purchased against my sage advice of course. Wrong again, dammit.). The product design (above) is restrained and elegant and there is a crisp customisable tile-based interface with simple, elegant animations and well-structured, spare typography using Monotype’s Segoe WP typeface. I’m envious of a non-Apple product for the first time in… ever. This is good news – competition raises the game and there is no reason why Apple must have a monopoly on good design. The Windows phone has let in some UI fresh air and is making Apple look just a bit… stuffy.
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Tags: accessibility, Apple, apps, graphic design, information design, iPhone, maps, Nokia, product design, typography, UI design, Windows phone
Posted in blog, distillation, information, visualisation | No Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
photo © Annie Queree
Outsourcing has been a big business idea – non-‘core’ activities executed for you by someone else. We bemoan the loss of skills & knowledge held in companies and have lowered expectations that employees might know much about what a company does beyond an sales script.
On a personal level we are doing much the same. Written a longhand letter lately? Every time I perform the quaint olde ritual of cheque writing, it seems to take more concentration to execute a legible word (admittedly my handwriting always looked like fallen spaghetti). With the simplest typed communication however, we are spellchecked and ‘helped’. Microsoft takes us by the hand, yet I find it hard to be grateful. Does knowing things still matter?
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Tags: cloud computing, communication, information, information design, outsourcing, skills
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Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
Having lately spent far more time than I care to in and around NHS facilities it is hard avoid noticing how much energy / resources are wasted when information is badly managed. I am no systems analyst, but even without an abacus for a mind the potential benefits of sorting out information in the NHS seem clear in three areas:
In some trusts, budgetary adjustments have reduced willingness to create / maintain good patient communications. Visits to dreary GP surgeries are not elevated by leaflet / poster displays that climb the walls like mutant strains of rising damp. Clip art and Comic Sans feature heavily in DIY print productions in which clarity and communication have taken a back seat. Patients should have the right to clear information in support of their treatment.
Physically navigating the NHS, its hospitals, clinics and other facilities can be complex. Some of the larger hospitals have decently planned sign systems and an air of calm efficiency as a result, but many smaller or regional ones do not, and those that are building / reorganizing often fail to consider users by properly re-routing them. How many late / missed appointments are caused by being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Exceptional facilities like the Kentish Town Integrated Care Centre seem to be from another world entirely. Owing its existence to an opportunity of history, the persistent vision of an individual and a gifted design team, such a paragon is unlikely to ever be anything like the norm, in this universe at least.
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Tags: accessibility, communication, design, graphic design, information design, nhs, service design
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Friday, February 4th, 2011
Photo: Damon Easley
Most designers prefer visual to verbal communication and often do a poor job of explaining the profession to outsiders, some of whom may have an inkling that problem-solving is involved, but most of whom cling limpet-like to the idea that design is about ‘making things look nice’. If only there were a handy phrase to describe what really goes on… I have just discovered (thank you BBC Radio 4) that there is a name for what is probably the key design aptitude.
In 1958 neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined apophenia to describe “the unmotivated seeing of connections” with a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”. Finding connections and meanings in experience – is that not the most interesting/valuable part of what designers do?
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Tags: apophenia, communication, creativity, design process, graphic design, information design, visual culture
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Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
That ‘knowledge is power’ is not disputed, but acceptance of the value of information is under threat. With unprecedented budget cuts becoming ‘normal’, the cost of communicating is called into question whilst its value is ignored.
With Crazy George & chums currently riding roughshod through UK public services, machetes flailing, there is financial pressure of the most intense kind on public institutions. Used to state regulation, detached from the free market’s instant and unforgiving feedback, there is no solid tradition of objectively balancing prioritities. Forced to plan big cuts, decision-makers may already have reached the “if I cut this will the entire institution fail tomorrow?” stage. Can we hope for measured appraisal of the worth of communications design in this climate? This must be a good time for designers to argue for the value of communications and information design wherever they get the chance.
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Tags: accessibility, brand design, budgets, communication, cost-cutting, cuts, economy, effectiveness, graphic design, information, information design, institutions, language, legibility, public services, spending, value, value for money
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Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Randomly chosen newspaper spread with stories grouped under two page headings. The wide field of vision allows many other connections/reasons-to-read
The Death of Print is a phrase regularly bandied about since the invention of TV (and probably radio before that), appearing with renewed vigour with the arrival of every new communications platform. The actual death of some newspapers and print publications lends urgency to the drama, but the reality is less apocalyptic. Jobs are lost, companies fail, the media landscape changes, but old formats (with the notable exception of the unloved videocassette) assume new roles rather than become extinct. The life and death struggle of old vs. new media is the easy narrative but old media has unique value which should ensure at least a modest survival.
New media platforms have given us massive advances in accessibility and empowerment – but they also come with a predisposition for targeted communication, ‘narrowcasting’ and self-selection. Old media, print especially, has one underappreciated benefit that is absent from the new stuff. It doesn’t decide quite so forcefully in advance what information will be of value to me, limiting what I might learn about the world.
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Tags: communication, design, graphic design, information design, iPad, legibility, media, newspapers, TV, typography, words
Posted in blog, distillation, information, typerbole, visualisation | No Comments »
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
You don’t construct a building façade-first, then install services, framework and foundations. You don’t build a car by starting with the bodywork. We don’t (unless recovering from a big night out) dress coat & shoes first. So why are some brands designed from the outside-in, imposing personality at odds with experience? Outside-in brand design can set expectations significantly adrift of reality, resulting in dissonant and negative communications and an unsustainable brand. How do you build a sustainable brand? From the inside out.
Graphic design is superficial, ephemeral. Much of it ends up, if not as yesterday’s fish & chip paper (they don’t do that any more), in the bottom of the budgie cage’s (no-one keeps those any more either), binned and recycled until fit only for landfill. Pixels or paper, graphic design is largely transient, disposable. Its outcomes may be all about about the surface but there is every reason why its process should have more depth.
At Wolff Olins as far back as the 1970s a much-used maxim was “you can’t paper over the cracks” i.e. if your company/product/service is poor, a stunning visual identity will not help you long-term, it only creates a credibility gap that makes things worse. Advice that clearly never reached the ears of hapless BP CEO Tony Hayward…
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Tags: BP, brand design, brand names, branding, communication, graphic design, information design, packaging, retail, service design, signage, visual culture
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