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| Charles Eames and Ray Eames |
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| Charles Eames and Ray Eames |
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| Charles Eames and Ray Eames |
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| Charles Eames and Ray Eames |
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| Charles Eames and Ray Eames |
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| Charles Eames and Ray Eames |
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| Charles Eames and Ray Eames |
Showing posts with label information design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label information design. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2018
Charles Eames and Ray Eames
Monday, March 7, 2016
Will Burtin: The Man Who Invented Infodesign, 1940s, from Eye 82
Will Burtin, the man who invented infodesign, 1940s – from Eye 82
Born in 1908 in a working-class district of Cologne, nothing about Will Burtin’s childhood suggested that the boy would one day pioneer several fields of graphic design, writes Robert Fripp in Eye 82.As a reluctant altar boy, he spent many early mornings at St Gereon’s Basilica. However, this unhappy experience did confer one lifelong benefit: the basilica’s painted images showed Burtin how design and form effectively conveyed information. At fourteen, he began studying typography in night school while working days for his first employer and mentor, Dr. Philippe Knöll. In 1926, Dr. Knöll’s typography shop was working overtime to produce text and illustrations for exhibitors at the upcoming international exposition, Düsseldorf’s GeSoLei.
By 1930, Burtin was an independent designer. Business grew with his reputation. His work came to the attention of Joseph Goebbels, the head of the Nazi propaganda ministry. In 1937, after Burtin rebuffed Goebbels’s invitation to head the ministry’s design section, Hitler summoned him to an interview in person. Burtin, and his Jewish wife, Hilde, fled Germany.
Sponsored by Hilde’s first cousin, wind tunnel designer Max Munk, the pair fled to the US, where, within months, he won a major contract from the US Government to create the Federal Works Agency’s exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Soon after that he was illustrating and designing for Time and Life magazines and The Architectural Forum.
Drafted in wartime to the Office of Strategic Services, Burtin headed a design team charged with a priority project: designing manuals for aerial gunners in bomber crews. Burtin’s clear design cut gunners’ training from six months to six weeks.
The late 1940s marked the apogee for using graphic design in magazines to illustrate technical, scientific and medical practices. The postwar world was new: it had discovered rockets, missiles, atomic bombs, antibiotics, jet engines, insecticide, television and the first computers. As the art director at Fortune magazine (1945-49), Will Burtin illustrated these emerging technologies for the sophisticated business leaders and readers building a new society on postwar innovation.
Simultaneously, Burtin took over as art director of Scope magazine (above), the Upjohn Company’s direct mailer to doctors. Reasoning that doctors use their hands to diagnose patients, Burtin responded by combining several different paper stocks in each tactile edition.
Burtin’s large physical models of biomedical processes for Upjohn – the Cell, the Brain, Metabolism, Genes in Action and Defense of Life – stand out. Often, Burtin’s work put into understandable form what scientists had previously been unable to visualize. His models attracted widespread attention and were featured in international publications and television specials.
Thus, the man with little formal schooling would be instructed in science by the likes of Albert Einstein (prior to illustrating one of the first printed articles on nuclear power), top neurologist Wilder Penfield, and futurist Buckminster Fuller. He translated their information in turn into visually comprehensible images.
Will Burtin: Design and Science
Will Burtin (1908-1972) was one of the foremost information designers of the twentieth century. After emigrating to the United States from Germany, Burtin became art director for Fortune magazine. Burtin established his own design firm in New York in 1949, with clients including Union Carbide, Eastman Kodak, the Smithsonian Institution, and Upjohn Pharmaceuticals. Through the design of Scope, the Upjohn firm's journal for physicians, as well as his award-winning exhibitions, Burtin made important advances in making scientific knowledge more accessible. The Will Burtin Archive is currently the largest collection in the GDA and was donated by Carol Burtin Fripp in 2000. In July 2005, the Getty Foundation awarded RIT a grant to process and organize the collection.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
From Ben Mazzotta's Weblog: Network Mapping Roundup
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| Ben Mazzotta. |
Ben Mazzotta is a postdoc at the Center for Emerging Market Enterprises (CEME).
You’ve got a complex system that you would like to map. Where do you start?
Of course the answer is, “Stop. Put down the pen. Ask yourself what the map must communicate.”
But once you’ve got a clear idea about that, and therefore the data you need to gather, and the way you’d like to analyze that data, … you may well need some new tools.
Network maps
Other approaches
And there’s my writing on dyadic dataset visualization through the use of cross-sections. Rather than a graph theoretic approach, I’ve advocated for the use of cross-sectional maps and hierarchic clustering as alternatives. Cross-sectional maps allow you to present high-quality
cross-sections of trade and investment data. Once you’ve got maps or cartograms of the cross-sections, you can create visualizations of series in the data. Very useful.
Hierarchic clustering can capture other relationships that derive from dyadic data, without directly visualizing the graph itself. I’ve argued that trade relationships derive from concentration of trade, specifically clubs of prominent countries and cliques of polarized trade partners. Hierarchic clusters can distill pictures of these two facets of dyadic trade data, without stacking the deck too much.
[A great conversation with David Braid of The Finance Lab today sparked this little discussion. He is brewing a project the global financial system which looks very promising. Our conversation touched on the Fed's map of the shadow banking system and Jess Bachman's US budget graphic.]
But once you’ve got a clear idea about that, and therefore the data you need to gather, and the way you’d like to analyze that data, … you may well need some new tools.
Network maps
- Mass and spring diagrams, for example in 2d and 3d
- Circular network diagrams
- Edge frequency distribution, for example in this paper
- Linear layout for visualization of networks
- And the infamous complex systems PDF that made the NYT
- (Beware! Causal loop diagrams have advocates too.)
- William Cleveland Visualizing Data
- Flowing Data
- Information Aesthetics
- Edward Tufte‘s blog
- ggobi
- GraphViz
- Protovis
- statnet (packages within R)
- ucinet (grandfather of social network analysis software)
- INSNA
- Journal of Statistical Software
- CRAN Task View gRaphical models in R
- ReadWriteWeb
- Visual Complexity
- Wikipedia
Other approaches
And there’s my writing on dyadic dataset visualization through the use of cross-sections. Rather than a graph theoretic approach, I’ve advocated for the use of cross-sectional maps and hierarchic clustering as alternatives. Cross-sectional maps allow you to present high-quality
cross-sections of trade and investment data. Once you’ve got maps or cartograms of the cross-sections, you can create visualizations of series in the data. Very useful.
Hierarchic clustering can capture other relationships that derive from dyadic data, without directly visualizing the graph itself. I’ve argued that trade relationships derive from concentration of trade, specifically clubs of prominent countries and cliques of polarized trade partners. Hierarchic clusters can distill pictures of these two facets of dyadic trade data, without stacking the deck too much.
[A great conversation with David Braid of The Finance Lab today sparked this little discussion. He is brewing a project the global financial system which looks very promising. Our conversation touched on the Fed's map of the shadow banking system and Jess Bachman's US budget graphic.]
Edward Tufte Excerpt on the Design of Causal Diagrams
Design of causal diagrams: Barr art chart, Lombardi diagrams, evolutionary trees, Feynman diagrams, timelines
by Edward TufteIt is easy to draw a linking line or an arrow of implied causality, but very hard to make credible causal inferences. Linking lines, arrows, and influence trees bring with them many implicit but powerful assumptions. Suppose we take the arrows seriously--how are we to evaluate the evidential quality of influence diagrams? The answer is clear, at least to the open and skeptical mind: by the usual standards for evidence of causality. A good start on what it takes to make causal inferences is found in A. Bradford Hill's classic paper on making causal inferences (in Hill's case, about the link between smoking and lung cancer), posted here. The principles of making sound causal inferences favor no particular ideology or point of view, except that of wanting to find out what is actually going on. Below is a discussion of the famous art chart of Alfred Barr. The analysis applies to evolutionary trees, Lombardi diagrams, and a good many timelines. The last two paragraphs are particularly important with regard to the assumptions involved in linking lines. The material below is from a draft of my book, Beautiful Evidence.\
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For more on the topic, visit Edward Tufte's website at:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000yO&topic_id=1
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| Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte. |
Edward Tufte: The AdAgeStat Q & A
In Which We Discuss the Role of Data in Presentations, How Media Underestimates Its Audience, and How to Create Trust in the Agency Pitch Process
by: Matt Carmichael Bio
November 09, 2011
Last month I joined 500 or so people who paid $380 a head to sit in a packed New York ballroom and … read.
Edward Tufte, the current dean of all things information design, considers reading to be a "high-resolution data dump" -- after all, people can typically read faster than a speaker can talk. Mr. Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale, is perhaps PowerPoint's most famous critic. He prefers a more academic and lecture-oriented format to his talks. Before he says a word, he expects you to spend some time reading selections from the nicely boxed set of four of his books included in his lecture price. "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is one of the most successful self-published books in history. (Mr. Tufte owns his own publishing company.) Nearly a quarter million have taken one of these sessions, offered many times a year throughout the U.S., including this sold-out three-day stint in Manhattan. He even has his own gallery, ET Modern in New York's Chelsea art district, which exhibits his sculptures and prints. Mr. Tufte had a personal brand before the there was such a thing. When even Seth Godin is in awe of your marketing ability, you clearly understand how to sell.
The audience at the New York event was a mix of designers, journalists, architects, marketers and people who clearly spend a lot of time on both sides of the PowerPoint projector. They had come to hear the man generally considered to the biggest thinker in the uber-trendy field of data visualization. Mr. Tufte has testified before Congress, advised presidents and coined terms such as "chartjunk" and "chartoons" to mock cutesy clutter thrown into presentations. He has created high-density graphic elements such as Sparklines, which are now built into Excel (Microsoft doesn't hold a grudge about the PowerPoint thing, it seems).
We chatted briefly before his talk and he agreed to field some questions to kick off an AdAgeStat Q&A series with visualization experts. His emailed responses came from his iPad.
AdAgeStat: Data reporting and visualization is all the rage in (print and online) news media these days. This is good in many ways, but often leads to a lot of malpractice. What news organizations do you think are doing it well, and are there some that you feel are overdoing it?
Mr. Tufte: On the interwebs, I think The Guardian is the best-designed newspaper and that The New York Times does the best visualizations by far.
AdAgeStat: Can visualizations make it easier for journalists/pundits/advertisers, etc. to "lie with numbers?"
Mr. Tufte: No, lying comes from the producer of the content, not the mode of production. Also highly produced visualizations look like marketing, movie trailers, and video games and so have little inherent credibility for already skeptical viewers, who have learned by their bruising experiences in the marketplace about the discrepancy between ads and reality (think phone companies).
AdAgeStat: In journalism, there's now a lot of pressure to wear many hats in budget-strapped newsrooms. Many writer-type folks are working on their own graphics. Is that a bad idea? Should we leave it to the pros or are there some simple rules that can keep us in line?
Mr. Tufte: Better to let the content people do the design than commercial artists. That is the secret of The New York Times' work: their visualization people are called "Graphics News Reporters" and they gather their own information as reporters. At a minimum, the content person should fully guide the hands of a designer and get design out of the way. Good content reasoners and presenters are rare, designers are not.
AdAgeStat: Can a good speaker make up for bad PowerPoint with what he/she actually says?
Mr. Tufte: PowerPoint benefits the bottom 10% of presenters by forcing them to have points, some points ... any points at all. And the best 10% of presenters have such good content, style and self-awareness that PowerPoint does little damage. PowerPoint should be used solely as a projector operating system to show 100% content, without the bullet grunts, logos and the formatting nonsense from the Strategic Communications Department, and the $20 million Pentagram corporate format guidelines. Such formats are about their precious turf-possessed selves and are the enemy of information and often truth.
AdAgeStat: You seem generally fond of Apple products. Is Keynote any better than PowerPoint or is the entire slide-like presentation format flawed?
Mr. Tufte: The inherent defect is the low resolution of materials that must be legible at 30 feet. But if the full screen is 100% content, then both PowerPoint and Keynote are fine. Keynote has a greater elegance than PowerPoint. The point is to avoid the PowerPoint cognitive style: hierarchical, bullets grunts, low resolution, and often about PowerPoint rather than the content. I found this to be even the case at NASA, where PowerPoint trumped rocket science -- and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board agreed with and published my analysis in their final Report.
AdAgeStat: In our industry, marketers (clients) often feel overwhelmed with the data available to them. Agencies love to churn out data, or as they say "actionable intelligence." So for the two sides of the agency/client relationship: If I'm a client getting pitched by a potential new agency, or an agency offering some new creative work, what should I watch out for? And if I'm an agency how can I make my case more credibly and honestly?
Mr. Tufte: First: "overwhelming data" is a bit of a hoax. Many of the time measurements have enormous serial correlation (just because you can measure to the millisecond doesn't mean you've learned anything about a process that moves to a monthly rhythm) and extreme high collinearities in the things measured (as in the endless web metrics, many of which are measuring the same thing over and over). Finally, most website data bizarrely and deliberately overstates the extent and intensity of website activity.
Second: overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don't throw out information. If something is confusing, don't blame your victim -- the audience -- instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers. Chartoons can't add interest, which is a content property. Chartoons are disinformation design, designed to distract rather than inform. Thus they reduce the credibility of your presentation. To distract, hire a magician instead of a chartoonist, for magicians are honest liars.
Third: the way to reason about what appear to be complex information spaces is to develop a sense of the relevant, of being able to identify crucial issues and interventions in complex information spaces. Steve Jobs had a great sense of the relevant.
Presenters need (1) to tell a coherent story and (2) to convince their audience of their credibility. A good way to gain credibility is not to have lied to the same audience last month. Another is to demonstrate that you are not a cherry picker, basing your case on evidence selection rather that on evidence. Another necessity is to demonstrate your mastery of detail. And, an important secret of good presenting is to finish early. Your audience will be thrilled and delighted.
AdAgeStat: While a well-crafted table might be the best way to convey a set of data properly, can there be value to creating a visualization that's eye-catching as a design element? In other words, as journalists, we often hear that our readers don't want just a big table, they want to be able to quickly visualize things in an eye-catching, unique way. Is that a fallacy?
Mr. Tufte: Graphics are at their best for really large data sets, as in sparklines for time series and NASA's photographs of the Earth. Sensibly-designed tables usually outperform graphics for data sets under 100 numbers. The average numbers of numbers in a sports or weather or financial table is 120 numbers (which hundreds of million people read daily); the average number of numbers in a PowerPoint table is 12 (which no one can make sense of because the ability to make smart multiple comparisons is lost). Few commercial artists can count and many merely put lipstick on a tiny pig. They have done enormous harm to data reasoning, thankfully partially compensated for by data in sports and weather reports. The metaphor for most data reporting should be the tables on ESPN.com. Why can't our corporate reports be as smart as the sports and weather reports, or have we suddenly gotten stupid just because we've come to work?
AdAgeStat: What are some tips for telling a story visually to an audience that's less data-inclined than say, you or I are?
Mr. Tufte: I think designers and marketers greatly underestimate their audiences.
 |
| Edward Tufte. |
In Which We Discuss the Role of Data in Presentations, How Media Underestimates Its Audience, and How to Create Trust in the Agency Pitch Process
by: Matt Carmichael Bio
November 09, 2011
Last month I joined 500 or so people who paid $380 a head to sit in a packed New York ballroom and … read.
Edward Tufte, the current dean of all things information design, considers reading to be a "high-resolution data dump" -- after all, people can typically read faster than a speaker can talk. Mr. Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale, is perhaps PowerPoint's most famous critic. He prefers a more academic and lecture-oriented format to his talks. Before he says a word, he expects you to spend some time reading selections from the nicely boxed set of four of his books included in his lecture price. "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is one of the most successful self-published books in history. (Mr. Tufte owns his own publishing company.) Nearly a quarter million have taken one of these sessions, offered many times a year throughout the U.S., including this sold-out three-day stint in Manhattan. He even has his own gallery, ET Modern in New York's Chelsea art district, which exhibits his sculptures and prints. Mr. Tufte had a personal brand before the there was such a thing. When even Seth Godin is in awe of your marketing ability, you clearly understand how to sell.
The audience at the New York event was a mix of designers, journalists, architects, marketers and people who clearly spend a lot of time on both sides of the PowerPoint projector. They had come to hear the man generally considered to the biggest thinker in the uber-trendy field of data visualization. Mr. Tufte has testified before Congress, advised presidents and coined terms such as "chartjunk" and "chartoons" to mock cutesy clutter thrown into presentations. He has created high-density graphic elements such as Sparklines, which are now built into Excel (Microsoft doesn't hold a grudge about the PowerPoint thing, it seems).
We chatted briefly before his talk and he agreed to field some questions to kick off an AdAgeStat Q&A series with visualization experts. His emailed responses came from his iPad.
AdAgeStat: Data reporting and visualization is all the rage in (print and online) news media these days. This is good in many ways, but often leads to a lot of malpractice. What news organizations do you think are doing it well, and are there some that you feel are overdoing it?
Mr. Tufte: On the interwebs, I think The Guardian is the best-designed newspaper and that The New York Times does the best visualizations by far.
AdAgeStat: Can visualizations make it easier for journalists/pundits/advertisers, etc. to "lie with numbers?"
Mr. Tufte: No, lying comes from the producer of the content, not the mode of production. Also highly produced visualizations look like marketing, movie trailers, and video games and so have little inherent credibility for already skeptical viewers, who have learned by their bruising experiences in the marketplace about the discrepancy between ads and reality (think phone companies).
AdAgeStat: In journalism, there's now a lot of pressure to wear many hats in budget-strapped newsrooms. Many writer-type folks are working on their own graphics. Is that a bad idea? Should we leave it to the pros or are there some simple rules that can keep us in line?
Mr. Tufte: Better to let the content people do the design than commercial artists. That is the secret of The New York Times' work: their visualization people are called "Graphics News Reporters" and they gather their own information as reporters. At a minimum, the content person should fully guide the hands of a designer and get design out of the way. Good content reasoners and presenters are rare, designers are not.
AdAgeStat: Can a good speaker make up for bad PowerPoint with what he/she actually says?
Mr. Tufte: PowerPoint benefits the bottom 10% of presenters by forcing them to have points, some points ... any points at all. And the best 10% of presenters have such good content, style and self-awareness that PowerPoint does little damage. PowerPoint should be used solely as a projector operating system to show 100% content, without the bullet grunts, logos and the formatting nonsense from the Strategic Communications Department, and the $20 million Pentagram corporate format guidelines. Such formats are about their precious turf-possessed selves and are the enemy of information and often truth.
AdAgeStat: You seem generally fond of Apple products. Is Keynote any better than PowerPoint or is the entire slide-like presentation format flawed?
Mr. Tufte: The inherent defect is the low resolution of materials that must be legible at 30 feet. But if the full screen is 100% content, then both PowerPoint and Keynote are fine. Keynote has a greater elegance than PowerPoint. The point is to avoid the PowerPoint cognitive style: hierarchical, bullets grunts, low resolution, and often about PowerPoint rather than the content. I found this to be even the case at NASA, where PowerPoint trumped rocket science -- and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board agreed with and published my analysis in their final Report.
AdAgeStat: In our industry, marketers (clients) often feel overwhelmed with the data available to them. Agencies love to churn out data, or as they say "actionable intelligence." So for the two sides of the agency/client relationship: If I'm a client getting pitched by a potential new agency, or an agency offering some new creative work, what should I watch out for? And if I'm an agency how can I make my case more credibly and honestly?
Mr. Tufte: First: "overwhelming data" is a bit of a hoax. Many of the time measurements have enormous serial correlation (just because you can measure to the millisecond doesn't mean you've learned anything about a process that moves to a monthly rhythm) and extreme high collinearities in the things measured (as in the endless web metrics, many of which are measuring the same thing over and over). Finally, most website data bizarrely and deliberately overstates the extent and intensity of website activity.
Second: overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don't throw out information. If something is confusing, don't blame your victim -- the audience -- instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers. Chartoons can't add interest, which is a content property. Chartoons are disinformation design, designed to distract rather than inform. Thus they reduce the credibility of your presentation. To distract, hire a magician instead of a chartoonist, for magicians are honest liars.
Third: the way to reason about what appear to be complex information spaces is to develop a sense of the relevant, of being able to identify crucial issues and interventions in complex information spaces. Steve Jobs had a great sense of the relevant.
Presenters need (1) to tell a coherent story and (2) to convince their audience of their credibility. A good way to gain credibility is not to have lied to the same audience last month. Another is to demonstrate that you are not a cherry picker, basing your case on evidence selection rather that on evidence. Another necessity is to demonstrate your mastery of detail. And, an important secret of good presenting is to finish early. Your audience will be thrilled and delighted.
AdAgeStat: While a well-crafted table might be the best way to convey a set of data properly, can there be value to creating a visualization that's eye-catching as a design element? In other words, as journalists, we often hear that our readers don't want just a big table, they want to be able to quickly visualize things in an eye-catching, unique way. Is that a fallacy?
Mr. Tufte: Graphics are at their best for really large data sets, as in sparklines for time series and NASA's photographs of the Earth. Sensibly-designed tables usually outperform graphics for data sets under 100 numbers. The average numbers of numbers in a sports or weather or financial table is 120 numbers (which hundreds of million people read daily); the average number of numbers in a PowerPoint table is 12 (which no one can make sense of because the ability to make smart multiple comparisons is lost). Few commercial artists can count and many merely put lipstick on a tiny pig. They have done enormous harm to data reasoning, thankfully partially compensated for by data in sports and weather reports. The metaphor for most data reporting should be the tables on ESPN.com. Why can't our corporate reports be as smart as the sports and weather reports, or have we suddenly gotten stupid just because we've come to work?
AdAgeStat: What are some tips for telling a story visually to an audience that's less data-inclined than say, you or I are?
Mr. Tufte: I think designers and marketers greatly underestimate their audiences.
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