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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
"The book itself is a diagram of clarification, containing hundredsof examples of work by those who favor the communication ofinformation over style and academic postulation--and those whodon't. Many blurbs such as this are written without a thoroughreading of the book. Not so in this case. I read it and love it. Isuggest you do the same." --Richard Saul Wurman "This handsome, clearly organized book is itself a prime exampleof the effective presentation of complex visual information." --eg magazine "It is a dream book, we were waiting for...on the field ofinformation. On top of the incredible amount of presented knowledgethis is also a beautifully designed piece, very easy tofollow..." --Krzysztof Lenk, author of Mapping Websites:Digital Media Design "Making complicated information understandable is becoming thecrucial task facing designers in the 21st century. WithDesigning Information, Joel Katz has created what willsurely be an indispensable textbook on the subject." --Michael Bierut "Having had the pleasure of a sneak preview, I can only say thatthis is a magnificent achievement: a combination of intelligenttext, fascinating insights and - oh yes - graphics. Congratulationsto Joel." --Judith Harris, author of Pompeii Awakened: A Storyof RediscoveryDesigning Information shows designers in all fields -from user-interface design to architecture and engineering - how todesign complex data and information for meaning, relevance, andclarity. Written by a worldwide authority on the visualization ofcomplex information, this full-color, heavily illustrated guideprovides real-life problems and examples as well as hypotheticaland historical examples, demonstrating the conceptual and pragmaticaspects of human factors-driven information design. Both successfuland failed design examples are included to help readers understandthe principles under discussion.
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Seitenzahl: 302
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Cover image: Joel Katz
Cover design: Joel Katz
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Katz, Joel, 1943– author.
Designing Information: Human factors and common sense in information design / Joel Katz.
p. cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-34197-1 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-41686-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-42009-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-44625-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-44629-4 (ebk)
1. Brand name products. 2. Branding (Marketing) 3. Trademarks-Design. I. Title.
HD69.B7W43 2011
658.8’27--dc22
2010049604
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Information is not knowledge andknowledge is not wisdom.
James GleickThe Information: A History,a Theory, a Flood
I certainly would be interested to work with a serious agency that can offer a flow of freelance projects. My specialty is Information Design, Branding, and Design Writing. You can preview my portfolio and my blog at….
Designer (not this one) responding to recruiting agency inquiry
Hmm…I’ve actually never heard of Information Design before (and I’ve been working in the creative industry for over 10 years now!). Maybe it would be best for us to talk over the phone. Call me when you have a moment.
Recruiting agency responding to designer
We want the book to look different enough so that teachers will want to buy it, but not so different that they feel they have to read it in order to teach it.
Textbook publisher (not this one) to designer (this one) on the designof a new middle school geographytextbook
Contents
12Introduction
14 1 Aspects of Information DesignThe nature of information
16 The nature of information
18 Self-referential vs. functional
20 When it doesn’t work
22 Non-wayfinding cartography
24 Learning from Minard
26 Simple and complex
28 Worlds in collision
30 Dispersed vs. layered
32 Anatomy and function
34 Metaphor and simile
36 Emotional power
38 Is it really urgent?
40 The branding fallacy
42 2 Qualitative IssuesPerceptions, conventions, proximity
44 Lines
46 Unintended consequences of shape
48 (Mis)connotations of form
50 The middle value principle
52 Connotations of color
54 Color constraints
56 Color and monochrome
58 From color to grayscale
60 Generations of labeling
62 Connections among people
64 Connections in products
66 Consistent and mnemonic notation
68 It’s about time
70 Point of view
72 Navigation: page and screen
76 Interpretation
78 3 Quantitative IssuesDimensionality, comparisons, numbers, scale
80 Information overload
82 Too much information
84 Too many numbers
86 Dimensional comparison
88 The pyramid paradox
90 How big?
92 Substitution
94 Numerical integrity
96 Meaningful numbers
98 Perils of geography
100 Escaping geography
102 Per capita
104 Data and form
106 Apples to apples: data scale consistency
108 Relative and absolute: ratios of change
110 Multi-axiality
112 Measurement and proportion
114 4 Structure, Organization, Type Hierarchy and visual grammar
116 The grid
118 Organizing response
120 (Dis)organization and proximity
122 Rational hierarchies
124 An intelligible ballot
126 Understanding audience needs
128 Staging information
130 Synecdoche
132 Is a picture worth 1,000 words?
134 Visualizing regulations
136 Focus and distraction
138 Language and grammar
140 Sans serif
142 Serif
144 Font efficiency
146 Typographic differentiation
148 Size matters (weight, too)
150 Legibility
152 Expressive typography
154 5 Finding Your Way? Movement, orientation, situational geography
156 What’s up? Heads up
158 Signs and arrows
160 Scale and adjacency
162 A movement network genealogy
164 Map or diagram?
166 Guiding the traveler, then and now
168 Information release sequence
172 Isochronics
174 Analogies in painting and sculpture
176 The road is really straight
178 Transitions and familiarity
180 Service, naming and addressing
182 (Ir)rational innovation
184 Perils of alphabetization
186 The view from below—or above
188 Urban open space
190 6 Documents Stories, inventories, notes
192 Credits
216 Inventory: Paris
218 Inventory: Italy
220 Bibliography
223 Gratitude
224 Index
226 About the author
Full disclosure.Philadelphia has been my home since 1972. I love it, and I would not dream of living anywhere else (in this country). I walk its streets, I read its newspaper, and I give my students assignments that engage them with local issues, problems, and people. The majority of my clients are regional. Philadelphia’s designs are the designs I know. I hope that any criticism of Philadel-phian design in this book will be taken constructively, in the spirit in which it is meant, and with the understanding that it is to some extent the result of geographic happenstance.
I have never had any direct client-designer relationship with any of the originators of the designs that I may appear to criticize in the book, nor are any of those designs by designers with whom I com-peted for work.
Every effort has been made to accurately credit the designers, artists, and authors whose work I have reproduced and discussed. Some of those acknowledgments and links may be unintentionally inac-curate. To the extent that inaccuracies may have found their way into this book, Isincerely apologize.
Introduction
Everything is designed. Most people have little understanding of the design process, but we all live with its results: a sign on the highway, an explanation of a medical procedure in an emergency room, a diagram on how to build a piece of furniture, a chart that shows us our assets, a ballot, a data-driven decision.
Not everyone realizes this. Many people assume that things just emerge in their finished visual form, like Athena springing, fully armed, from Zeus’s forehead. This may explain why design isn’t always as good as it needs to be.
Our job as designers is to design with intent, so that the objects we design function as they are sup-posed to for those who need them and use them.
Our job as information designers is to clarify, to simplify, and to make information accessible to the people who will need it and use it to make important decisions. Informa-tion needs to be in a form they can understand and use meaningfully, and to tell the truth of what things mean and how they work.
The purpose of this book is to provide a description of issues that confront designers as we attempt to translate data into information so that our audience can understand it and apply it to answer their questions and meet their needs.
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In its structure, this book endeavors to examine the many aspects of designing information. Its title is intentional: it is a book about ideas and process more than about showcasing designs and products that have already been designed to fill specific needs.
The velocity of the increase in accessible data is unprec-edented, amazing, and increasing. Not very long ago in design his-tory, cartographers (among the first modern information designers) were decorating their maps with sea mon-sters, locations of fictional characters, and imaginary islands, less for visual elegance than to fill the spaces where they had no information. “Terra incog-nita” had multiple meanings.
Our challenge today is almost the opposite from that of centuries, or even decades, past: to invent ways of sifting through the multitudes of data that bombard us daily, often numbing our senses and scrambling our brains.
In looking at and thinking about the issues of designing information rationally and function-ally, I was informed and humbled by the work of preceding generations of information designers. As a teacher, I have learned as much from my stu-dents as I hope I have imparted. While I have occasionally found students a bit weak in cultural and design history, I attribute this in large measure to the ubiquity of technology, which permits some of the young to believe that everything happened this morning, or no earlier than yesterday. This makes technology part of the problem as well as potentially part of the solution.
The ideas in this book have been rattling around in my head for decades, in one form or another, and its goals and form have changed many times. I feel that many of the ideas and perceptions that occurred to me then have been confirmed.
Information design is a hot subject for books and websites and blogs these days. I’ve learned a great deal from the books I’ve read and the sites and blogs I’ve visited. To my great pleasure, as I communicated with peers and colleagues, I found that there is a thoughtful, generous com-munity of designers who are willing to share and assist each other.
It is my sincere hope that this book may provide similar assistance and ideas to its readers.
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14
1
Aspects of Information Design
The nature of information
To design it is to interpret it.
Chris Myers
Above. A reconstruction of my favorite Irish road sign, meaning “unprotected quay.” It’s simple, unambiguous, and powerful.
Below. The OPTE project. “The first goal of this project is to use a single computer and single Internet connection to map the location of every single class C network on the Internet.”— Barnett Lyon
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The nature of information
Like Caesar’s Gaul, information is divided into three principal parts.
Information is what you absolutely must clearly communicate.
Uninformation is stuff that isn’t necessarily important and that probably isn’t untrue.
• Within uninformation is where the designer plays and dances.
• Within uninformation is noninformation, which is often uninformation appearing to be information.
Misinformation is stuff masquerading as information that is likely to distort, confuse, and mislead (and possibly injure, maim, kill).
• Misinformation is not necessarily deliberate but may be the result of unintentional incompetence, noncurrent data, or failure to correctly interpret source data.
• At the nadir of misinformation is disinformation (from the Russian dezinformatsiya), misinformation deliberately used to achieve a financial, political, or military objective.
Read Charles Seife. Proofiness. Seife identifies a host of ways in which num-bers are used, or misused, to convince people and the media that things that are demonstrably not true are, in fact, verifiably true.
Go tohttp://charlesseife.com/books
See alsoNumerical integrity; Page 194 top left and bottom center.
Indicium est omne divisa in partes tres.
(All information is divided into three parts.)
Paraphrase of Julius Caesar, in Commentarii de Bello Gallico, ca. 40s BCE.
If the Hippocratic oath were written for designers, it would begin, “First, tell no lie.”
This inflatable tank is an example of disinformation used prior to the Normandy landings in 1944. Operation Fortitude, as it was called, involved the cre-ation of fake field armies both north and south of the actual invasion landing site to divert Axis attention away from Nor-mandy. It was one of the most successful military deceptions of the war.
Propaganda.Could be true; could be false; probably incom-plete. Politicians just love small children, don’t they? This photo-graph is from a 1940 pro-Hitler propaganda booklet.
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Self-referential vs. functional
Self-referential design is where (only) the designer understands.
Pragmatic design is where the user understands.
Whatever the medium and whatever the content, the purpose of information design is to convey information to the user. If the user can’t understand it, the design and the designer have failed.
The difference is not unlike the difference between school and the world. In school, students function largely within a relatively homogeneous community of their peers and instructors, where they learn to research a problem, explore alternatives, and defend their solution in terms of their thinking and design process. In the world—in life—designers, especially information designers, deal with communicating information visually to a user group some-times very unlike themselves.
Often the designer, in life as well as in school, falls into the trap of designing for appearance, and using the data, or content, not as the core of a communications process but as the foundation for explorations of visual excess and irrel-evance. Many graphic and information design curricula are responding to society’s needs and teaching that form grows organically out of the need to communicate content.
This conveys a powerful responsibility upon—and a great opportunity for—the designer.
“Intellectual”—non-user-centered—design, and personal explanations of self-referential design, lead back only to the designer, not forward to the user.
Read Jorge Frascara. Communication Design: Principles, Methods, and Practice.
A seminal quote by Richard Grefe, Executive Director of the AIGA, on the back of a t-shirt worn by information designer Paul Kahn. I have said, “the designer is the medium between the information and the user.” As with many quotes in this book, the identical idea can usually be attributed to many people.
Like good writing, good graphical displays of data communicate ideas with clarity, precision, and efficiency.
Michael Friendly
The data, the designer, and the audience are the fundamental continuum in information design.
If it doesn’t work for the user, no amount of explanation can make it any better.
Accessible symbolism: the 168 chairs in the Oklahoma City bombing memorial. Inaccessible symbolism: the 1,776-foot height of the Freedom Tower.
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When it doesn’t work
It’s not enough to know the base data—in its most literal sense—of an information graphic. One has to understand what it means, which requires knowing how the particular set of information being visualized was selected and, from there, the designer’s point of view.
Information, even after it has been distilled from data, and even when it is “true,” has intention, interpretation, and often an agenda that has governed its selection: political, social, religious, and “pack-everything-in” are examples of possible motivations behind an information graphic.
Many data sets and information designs, past and present, have been constrained by a lack of data, geographic or statistical, the other side of the mirror of many current “info-graphics” that are overloaded with data just because it exists. It could be said that the task of information designers in the past—particularly cartographers—was to create “informa-tion” where no data existed, and that the task of information designers today is to refine and reduce an overabundance of data into meaningful and usable information.
Information design, when successful—whether in print, on the web, or in the environment—represents the functional balance of the meaning of the information, the skills and inclinations of the designer, and the perceptions, education, experience, and needs of the audience.
Often, these components are out of balance for any one or more of a number of reasons.
Data
• The data are incomplete, skewed, or missing; or too gross in grain, oversimplified, or lacking in meaningful detail;
• The data do not reveal their meaning because of lack of definition or misleading relationships within them;
• The data are too dense, arcane, or technical to be trans-formed into understandable information.
Chaos out of order.We are used to seeing ads like this in the automotive section of our newspaper (those of us who still read newspapers). Interestingly, this ad is comparatively well organized, but—not content to leave what might have been well enough alone—over-crowding and a riot of fonts and
exhortations destroys what—in the hands of a capable designer—might have been much better than terrible.
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Designer
• The designer is unable to understand the meaning of—and therefore unable to distill and visualize—the data;
• The designer is not adequately sensitive to human factors issues and may not be able to model the needs, abilities, and limitations of the audience;
• The designer might be overly concerned with designing a visually compelling graphic, resulting in counter-intuitive or, worse, misleading or inaccurate design solutions.
Audience
• The audience may be unable to understand the information because of lack of visual literacy or education, unfamiliarity with visual conventions of the subject, lack of specialized intelligence, lack of interest in the subject, or other factors.
Go tohttp://blog.metmuseum.org/penandparchment/introduction/
See alsoSimple and complex; Connections among people; Connections in products; Information overload; Too much information; Page 194 top center.
Indifference toward people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.
Dieter Rams
Unsuccessful design happens when:
• no one understands;
• no one cares;
• it’s not anyone’s job;
• some or all of the above.
Determining the appropriate content for the communication of information requires a rigorous process of examination:
Is it true?
Is it relevant?
Is it necessary?
Does its inclusion add or detract?
Is it in a form that its audience can understand?
Intentional chaos.This “chart” of President Obama’s proposed health care system was released by the Republican side of the Joint Economic Committee on 28 July 2010 (www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2650278/posts), purporting to show “Obamacare’s bewildering com-plexity.” It does not compare the plan’s complexity either with the existing health care structure nor to any proposal put forward by the Republicans in Congress. A good example of misinformation. (The legend has been deleted.)
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Rev. Father F. N. Blanchet made first use of this “Catholic Ladder” in July 1842 at the Cowlitz Mission to teach the Indians the main truths of the Catholic faith. Many copies of the ladder were made and pre-sented to the Indian chiefs.
The 40 horizontal bars represent the 40 centuries BCE (when the world was declared by James Ussher to have been created in 4004 BCE). The 33 dots repre-sent the years of Christ’s life on earth. The 18 bars represent the 18 centuries CE and the 42 dots represent the 42 succeeding years.
A student map for a project on gang presence in New Jersey for a bi-annual report by the New Jersey State Police. By building a map in which each county was represented as a square of equal size, numerous quantities, both in actual numbers and in percentages, could be consis-tently and visually expressed.
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Non-wayfinding cartography
I categorize non-wayfinding maps and diagrams into four basic categories:
1 Geographic (not illustrated on this spread): the most familiar type of maps, they represent space with geographic accu-racy and at a constant scale. They are the predominant map type in most atlases. Included in this category are simplified geographic maps designed to make wayfinding and move-ment networks more easily understandable.
2 Conceptual: these maps (and diagrams) may take extreme liberties with geography, or ignore it almost entirely, to describe or promote a concept or point of view. Many of these maps, especially in the past, when accurate geographic knowledge was incomplete at best, are often based on a theological or users’ affinity view of the world.
3 Experiential (not illustrated on this spread), often diagram-matic: how place and space are experienced, felt, measured, and perceived, often very different from geography. Each of us experiences space and time uniquely. Children’s percep-tions of a place and the geographically distorted units of space and time experienced in transit travel with no visible geographic references are in this category.
4 Numerical/statistical: maps that adjust geography to reflect place-specific statistics. They are used to show change, relationships between and/or among places or political entities, and other numerical or statistical (non-geographic) comparisons.
Many maps and diagrams embody a combination of these categories.
Left. The “T-in-O” map (so called for the letterforms created by the bodies of water and the surrounding ocean) is one of a large number of maps that emphasize theology over geog-raphy. Based not on geographic ignorance, as occasionally thought, its intent was to sum-marize a Christian world view in a simple and memorable form (not unlike Harry Beck’s iconic London Underground map of 1931, which created a simple and memorable image of a complex movement network).
Although the map is shown as a flat disk for simplicity, it was well known that the earth is roughly spherical. Its construc-tion is theologically governed: east is at the top, as it was believed that Paradise is to the east; Jerusalem is at the center; the three continents show the division of the world by the sons of Noah.
Read Alessandro Scafi. Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth.
Go to Cartographia: http://cartographia.wordpress.com/about
http://blog.metmuseum.org/penandparchment/exhibition-images/cat300r2_49e
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020610/medieval_maps.shtml
See alsoAnatomy and function;Escaping geography; A move-ment network genealogy; Map or diagram?
Another student project, like the map on the opposite page, illustrates two phases of a U.S. government housing program awarded to cities—the Neigh-borhood Stabilization Program. Phase 1 grants (right) were awarded on a system based on need. Phase 2 grants (far right) were awarded competitively. The area of each square is proportional to the size of the grant; the colors of the squares relate to 20 additional graphs in the project; and the distribution of the squares locates the cities geographically in the United States.
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Described by Edward R. Tufte as “the best statistical graphic ever drawn,“ Minard’s map has long been the subject of discus-sion, analysis, and attempts to improve it. Some of these are shown in Section 6 of this book.
The table below was retrofitted from the data in the Minard map and other sources.
Although it is possible to order the table by date (as it is), by troop numbers, by geography, or by temperature (for the return), the table remains col-umns of numbers—code.
A re-creation of the “executive summary” of Minard’s diagram.
This [the Minard map above] is one of the worst graphs ever made. [Tufte’s] very happy because it shows five different pieces of information on three axes and if you study it for fifteen minutes it really is worth a thousand words. I don’t think that’s what graphs are for. I think they try to make a point in two seconds for people who are too lazy to read the forty words underneath. And to make me spend fifteen minutes studying it doesn’t make sense….Seth Godin Quoted by Jorge Camoes on 21 January 2008http://www.excelcharts.com/blog/minard-tufte-kosslyn-godin-Napoleon/
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Learning from Minard
In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), Edward R. Tufte introduced the design community (and beyond) to Charles Joseph Minard’s 1869 graphic of Napo-leon’s disastrous march to Moscow and back in the winter of 1812–1813.
Minard’s map integrates four types of information design (and six categories):
1 Space (often used interchangeably with geography, to which it occasionally bears a resemblance). While simplified, Napo-leon’s route maintains a consistent and accurate scale, with adequate geographic references.
2 Time (return only). Minard uses dates keyed to temperature to show both the speed at which distance was covered and temperature’s relationship to the staggering loss of troops.
3 Numbers—of troops and their relationship to place and tem-perature. (The Réaumur temperature scale sets the freezing point of water at 0° and the boiling point at 80°.)
4 Events. Troop strength and reinforcements; river crossings during the brutal winter, on the return, particularly at the River Bérézina. (Since that time, Bérézina has been used by the French as a synonym for disaster.)
Minard’s graphic has beome something of a self-perpet-uating industry and continues to fascinate designers, information architects, information scientists, statisticians, teachers, and students; it is truly the 800-pound gorilla in the information design room.
To ask for a map is to say, “Tell me a story.”
Peter Turchi
The brilliance of Minard’s map is the ability to integrate and permit comparison of qualitative, quantitative, and geographic information in the same graphic.
Read Edward R. Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
Go tohttp://www.datavis.ca/
http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/re-minard.php
http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/229-vital-statistics-of-a-deadly-campaign-the-minard-map
See alsoAnatomy and function;It’s about time; Escaping geog-raphy; Page 194 right.
Everyone needs to do a “Minard,” it seems. This was done by the author, who makes no claim to its superiority.
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Simple and complex
We have long been visualizing things that we cannot see, either because they are too small, too far away, or have working components that are enclosed. With the advent of the internet and the attendant proliferation, collection, and organization of data, we are now mapping and visualizing connections and relationships at an unprecedented rate.
Many of these visualizations are extremely practical, and aid in understanding relationships within a complex site or organization. Others deal with unimaginably complex relationships among data, and their creation is aided—and impossible without—sophisticated computer applications.
Unfortunately, being able to visualize ungraspable relation-ships does not necessarily make them more graspable. There comes a point where the data—whether it is visualized or listed—simply run into the limits of the human mind.
While computers expand their capacity at an exponen-tial rate (Moore’s law—the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years), human beings do not evolve at the same rate. So we find ways of understanding the larger picture and its meaning.
Many designers working with computers have pushed this genre of information design out of the realm of communi-cation and into that of art. The algorithms they write have become the notational tools of visual information art, much as musical scores are the notational tools of aural art, permit-ting their forms to be archived, revisited, and re-applied to new instruments, data, and ideas.
This visualization of the orga-nizations and personalities most mentioned in The New York Times in 2009 was made by information artist Jer Thorp. Connections between these people and organizations are indicated by lines. Data is from the NYTimes Article Search API:developer.nytimes.com
In the fall of 2003, Kahn + Associates, Paris, was engaged by the Département de la bibliothèque numérique at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to analyze the public websites of three major English-language national libraries and compare them with the website of the French national library. The Library of Congress, the British Library, and the National Library of Australia were the other three websites analyzed.
Some information is very simple; some is very complex. The trick is to make complex information understandable.
Bruno Martin
Read Philip Morrison, Phyllis Morrison, Office of Charles and Ray Eames. Powers of Ten: A Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.
Manuel Lima. Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information.
Paul Kahn, Krzysztof Lenk. Map-ping Websites: Digital Media Design.
George L. Legendre. Pasta by Design.
Go tohttp://powersof10.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blprnt/sets/72157614008027965/with/3291244820/
See alsoToo many numbers.
Simple to look at and delicious to eat, this pasta shape (stroz-zapreti: priest stranglers) are mathematically extremely com-plex. One of 189 illustrations in Pasta by Design.
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An example of a parking sign type in use prior to the introduc-tion of new regulations. It wins no design prizes, with silly pic-tograms, a lot of unneccessary rules, and an ambiguous use of figure-ground changes—but at least no vertical splits.
An example of a parking sign after the introduction of new regulations. The new regula-tions required a vertical split because there was so much “information.” Some elements were unnecessary, such as the graphic of the contractors’ placard: the contractors know what their placard looks like.
A digital mockup of the stu-dents’ sign format applied to the same location. No vertical split and coded color for loading zones and payment information. Category headline treatments are typographically uniform, and there is a clear hierarchy of importance.
Two pages from the RFP (Request for Proposal) that led to the signs shown top center.
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Worlds in collision
This is a story of a well-intentioned endeavor undone by its own inherent conflicts: on-street parking in downtown (“Center City”) Philadelphia.
When parking was relatively inexpensive (i.e., less expensive than garages), on-street parking was monopolized by com-muters who ran out every few hours to feed the meter. Those who needed only short-term parking circled the block (pol-luting the air) or used garages (with extremely high charges for the first hour) and got angry, resentful, and started shop-ping and visiting services outside Center City.
New regulations were developed to mitigate this trend and to balance, to the extent possible, the parking needs of residents, workers, and visitors, as described in the caption at left.
The signs communicating parking regulations—even when those regulations were comparatively simple—were never examples of typographic excellence and clarity. When the new regulations, signs, and kiosks were implemented, the conflicts between communicating extremely complex infor-mation, the context in which it operates, and the audience it is addressing became almost impossible—a perfect example of no good deed going unpunished.
The students’ solution, notwithstanding the unfortunate implementation that followed it, suggests that there are some conditions that are so difficult to communicate that a wholly satisfying design solution is likely to elude even the best designers. This was a revelation to them, as design students are often taught (and designers like to believe) that there is no design problem that cannot be solved well.
The answer is to collaboratively address the multiple aspects of the problem holistically, so that operations are brought more closely in line with the designer’s ability to commu-nicate them in a particular context and the user’s ability to understand them.
See alsoStaging information.
In 2008 the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) changed and complicated the parking game by intro-ducing a more complex set of regulations than had previously existed, all in the city’s best parking interests:
• Encourage full-day workers to use parking garages by raising the cost of street parking, thereby reducing traffic conges-tion aggravated by parkers circling the block and polluting the air.
• Increase the number of loading spaces and the specificity of contractors’ permit regulations.
• Replace meters with kiosks, to accept credit and debit cards as well as cash and Authority pre-paid cards.
• [Presumably] communicate these regulations effectively.
The implementation of these objectives led to a multifold increase in the complexity of regulations needing to be communicated by signs, which now also had to identify the payment kiosks and explain their use.
Every silver lining has a cloud.Left. The PPA enthusiastically received the students’ solu-tion. Their vendor kept asking them (and me) for fonts, which we kept sending. They never explained what their problem was or what they needed. So they just ignored the design. Like a plague, the bastardization of the students’ design continues to proliferate throughout the city.
There’s never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over.
Printer’s saying
And sometimes there isn’t.Designed in a rush, the place-ment of components and instructions appears to have been determined by engi-neering expediency rather than by consideration of users’ needs.
In addition to parking sign modules, the students also made an effort to improve the kiosk graphics, without being able to alter its physical components.
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This diagram is both simple and clear, particularly with regard to the volume of the drink and the proportions of each ingre-dient. It follows the principle of information expansion, using two-dimensional space gener-ously to avoid confusion and visual complexity. Unlike the layered graphic of the same information below, it does make seeing the overlap of ingredi-ents abd their combination time consuming.
Rancher, analogous to the dia-gram at right.
Triplex, analogous to the Venn diagram at right.
This elegant and intriguing Venn diagram uses space effi-ciently by layering, but relative quantities are difficult to ascer-tain, and understanding the components requires memo-rizing or looking back and forth at the legend.
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Dispersed vs. layered
There is always a range of responses to visualizing given quantities and categories of information. Although both the page and the screen are two-dimensional planes, information can be visually layered by adding the illusion of three-dimensional space: in other words, substituting the illusion of volume for the “reality” of area—think of a sprawling ranch house compared to a triplex apartment with the same square footage. Another device is the illusion of transparency, which permits multiple notation types to be layered on top of each other in acknowledged two-dimensional space—the fundamental premise of the Venn diagram, named for John (Donald A.) Venn (1834–1923).
Imagine a data set with three or four variables combined in most of their possible variations. The designer can visualize those combinations in two basic ways. One is to visualize each combination separately; the other is to create a multi-variate Venn—provided the data subsets permit—in which transparency and pattern are used to layer different compo-nents in a way that creates a compact but dense graphic.
The trade-offs are straightforward. In the case of many sepa-rate data subsets, each subset (combination of variables) is immediately understandable, but comparison among them can only be done one pair at a time. In the case of a layered diagram—a multidimensional Venn, so to speak—it is easy to see in which combinations each variable is used, but a sense of the whole and components of each data subset are more difficult to ascertain and compare. The diagram with sepa-rated components uses two-dimensional space, repetition, and redundancy liberally; the Venn diagram with layering and transparency uses two-dimensional space efficiently but requires concentrated study.
Read Massimo Vignelli. The Vignelli Canon.
Go tohttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/charles_m_blow/index.html?s=oldest&
See alsoDimensional comparison.
It’s all about how much you fill the cup. Massimo Vignelli with his original coffee cup that he designed for Heller. People complained about the semicir-cular notch in the lip (they were burning their palms when hot coffee spilled into the concave handle) and Heller asked him to plug it up.
Vignelli’s apocryphal response was that Americans might try emulating the more elegant Italian demitasse serving and not fill their cups to the brim.
Heller plugged it up anyway.
