“information design”

That multimedia brings subjects “alive” is a painfully false cliche these days. For me at least. Maybe I’m just disappointed by the yawning gap between promise and (often gratuitous) delivery. Maybe I’m still too word-centric.

Thus my surprise with this animation of that most famous embroidered account of the 1066 Norman invasion of England (→), the Bayeaux Tapestry^WP. It’s so simple and yet so stunningly effective. (Though of course I have a sweet spot for animated tapestries…)

I can’t watch it without wondering what its weavers at the turn of the first millennium would say if they could look at their creations now.

(via Very Short List, which neatly sums up the work with a Venn diagram—as is their intriguing custom—, )

A map of relations among scientific paradigms, this is a masterpiece of information design. Both¹ data, algorithms, and design (particularly typography) are awe-inspiring. Read up on them on Seed magazine, which has an article on it and hosts the 3.5MB graph, and on Information Aesthetics, where you can buy (or soon will, they’re experiencing some technical difficulties) a gorgeous print for 10 bucks (shipping and handling included!).

Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.

Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.

It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).

As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.

Never would’ve thought designing calendars was this fun. (PokeCalendario, btw, is a great turn of phrase by James P. Wack)

Minimaxi

This really won’t save you any work at all but it’s sure to baffle casual onlookers.

At heart is just the usual distributive^WP algorithm we all use when multiplying arabics^WP, rearranged and visually rewritten using the immediate correspondence of crisscrosses to multiplication: .

My winners, so far this year, of the Keep the Web Weird prize.

• Susan Stepney’s Homepage. Swim around her factoids or her myriad book reviews—sci-fi and non-fiction being the two categories. And boy does she read good nonfiction. Check her rated non-fiction index for a good glimpse of it and notice how her book reviews tend to grow organically into full-fledged bibliographies [example].

• Luis Pabon’s Entropía blog (in Spanish). If you can only read one thing from him, let it be El hombre que hablaba al reves (The man who spoke the wrong way round)—it’s positively brilliant. Positively.

  There’s also a letter to his future self; oblique strategies; an elegant fable: El pez que se bebió el océano (The fish who drank the ocean); obscure calendar erudition: La abreviatura de los miércoles (Wednesday’s abbreviation); original music; a scanning of a (terrifying) dictation from a Spain under Franco: Libertad Dictada (Dictated Freedom); a reflection sparked by GTD^WP: Conocerse a sí mismo (Knowing Oneself); an absolutely amateur, yet interesting, physics experiment: Acústica de fluidos; and a beautiful, infinite poem. Even his profile is writing of the highest order.

  He has infodesign talent to spare, as he showed with his proposal in my calendar challenge, and he can sometimes use it for most amusing purposes. Like these two graphs here, perfectly illustrating why sometimes to go forward it’s better to get some distance first:

  
  

  Most intriguing is when he combines this graphic inclination with his (prodigious) verbosity to create amazing, longwinded plays with the ridiculous (think of that famous bathroom-tissue-distribution-units passage from Snow Crash^WP). There’s for instance the Messiah Project, his compendium of priorization strategies, and his “simple graphical and mathematical model for the analysis and assessment of situations according to a person’s capacity, responsibility, and will.”

  “Luis… estás como un cencerro!!!” says a legendary comment. Correctly.

Tab Mix Plus is simply a pretty good Firefox extension that adds a lot of extra, welcomed functionality to your tabs. Today, lost somewhere within its not so easy-to-use preference pane, I found a little tooltip that is a wonder of clarity, of communication^EEM.

What was meant to happen, happened. I ended up participating in my own infodesign calendar challenge (where, of course, I’m one of the judges—my mom and a friend being the other two). Rather, I was one of the judges. The challenge’s doing a lot of soul-searching right now, looking for new judges, and even wondering whether it would be better to call itself a cooperation instead of a competition. (Thoughts?)

I started the challenge because while I thought designing a better calendar was a fascinating problem, I had no idea whatsoever of how to attack it. Then a magical thing happened with other people’s submissions: no big idea came, but a myriad minor improvements suggested themselves. So I started building mockups and tweaking them a little here, a little there, to prove minor points to myself. The tweaking got out of control, ate more and more of my time, and suddenly biggish, elegant ideas started coming up.

So I spent the past 5, 6 days drawing calendars over and over (and over). It was part escapism from my grandfather dying in the room below mine, but it was also unbelievable fun designing something and then have it be extruded into atoms by my clunky but trusty HP—how concrete and intricate, how physical!^EEM I felt like a miniature artisan or a clockworker. And it really is wonderful to work in a simple problem you can easily explain to people.

This down here is the current outcome (there’s a Spanish version here). Click on it for detailed instructions (if you need’em), descriptions and critique. It’s the end result of a lot of incremental improvements I’ve painstakingly tried to document in this Flickr set—funny it now looks so glaringly obvious.

What do you think? I’ve fiddled with it for several days now and have returned to it again and again. My tired eyes see no clear way of improving it—how about yours? (Here, btw, is the (Excel 2007) source file—yours to fiddle with and build upon.)

(btw2: I did all my prototypes in my beta-testing version of Excel 2007^ELZR. Thought it would be a good chance to take it for a spin and see what the much-vaunted interface improvements amounted too. Turns out they’re rightly vaunted. It’s as good as they told you and then a little better. It’s just so much easier, so much more pleasurable to use the program when so many options are so neatly displayed. The live previews I thought so little of in the videos turn out to be surprisingly helpful. Goodbye toolbar clutter, welcome ribbon. It’s a revolution worth Vista’s failed one.)