I recently bought a copy of In/Visible: Graphic Data Revealed.

It's quite good, especially for the NYT-philes out there.

The best thing was this quote - towards the end of the book, which comes as a bit of a shock after the general celebration of visual reasoning.

The book details a panel discussion. The chairperson says "a good friend of mine told me ... a picture's worth a thousand words but it takes words to say that".

I thought that was an excellent quote.

There is a stack of interest (about time) in what visual information can do. Lots of people are getting very excited. Coffee table books are even coming out. The game is afoot.

But.

There is a challenge for information designers to know when to let prose communicate.

It is a challenge to designers to write better (or write).

It is a challenge to all designers to integrate with all parts of their business better - and not just do the 'pictures'.

Or - to do the pictures but to realise that other modes of communication are as important and indeed complimentary to what they are doing.

In print media, where no sound is available, visual articulation of data can sell a complex idea that may be secreted in the text, retrievable only after a satisfying read.

At a conference last year, I chatted to Hans Rosling and when I asked about causation and correlation in information visualisation, he got happily irate. He said "graphics and data-vis will show you the overview - they will show you where to investigate further - but they will not do all the work required of understanding a subject".

Designers sometimes lock themselves away from the client - especially in the bustle of editorial set-ups where draughtsmanship requires some quiet. But don't do it. The readers need a multimodal way of understanding the story.

Research into Information graphics we did at BBC News after 9/11 indicated that the simple graphics were popular. The ones that had a map to show where. A photo for some colour and actuality. A basic diagram to show detail of what had happened. These were much more effective that the map-photo-diagram-3d hybrids that tried too hard but couldn't do any of the jobs required.

So back to text. 

Should designers understand their place in a predominantly text based culture? 

Should we be the best behaved people at that party if we want to keep getting invited? 

Or should we listen to those who say rock the boat and rebel?

I'd say if you do want to shout from the barricades, try using some words and not just pictures.

There has been a bit of a fuss about the Hong Kong based Apple Daily's use of video reconstructions around the Tiger Woods events.

I like them. They are Impro-graphics - they totally make stuff up and they revel in that. They are what the celebrity/prensa-rosa press would love to be - totally fantastical improvised fun.

The reason that people are uncomfortable about them is that they are used to portray the 'facts' in the T Woods 'story'. (There may well be a bunch of those 'quotes' by the way - it's that kind of post.) 

This is a fantastic way to do speculative celebrity entertainment. It is the real life cartoon rendering of the gossip pages - come to life -  in a suitably unreal 3d veneer - it is perfect for the unreal portrayal of the totally made up that most celeb papers/magazines are. 

They pitch their stories into the fantasy mind of their viewers - who do not for one minute care about the facts - they just want to make believe - and these nutty 3d mirages allow precisely that. They let the audience pretend (Russell Davies talks nicely about pretending in this post/talk)

Now, the use of this tech in News/ factual graphics is another matter - I don't believe it really has a place.

I think that the difficulty is that Apple Daily is also an imparter of facts. And the use of this fun stuff sits uneasily with that. Most dumbing down accusations come with uneasy juxtaposition of different stuff for different audiences - not the stuff in itself.

It is all a matter of the intention of the designer. The celeb graphics are obviously stupid - they are what they are - and they are a bit of a laugh. But 3d graphics purporting to tell the truth about news events stray into difficult territory. To render in 3d you need to render everything - and it is often that the news designer doesn't know everything. The use of 3d requires them to ad lib - as they cannot use the nuances of a pencil sketch.

This site puts it well - they expand on a premise in the sound book The Experience Economy - that of the Fake Real, Real Fake etc

– Real-real: is true to itself; is what it says it is

– Real-fake: is not true to itself; is what it says it is

– Fake-real: is true to itself; is not what it says it is

– Fake-fake: is not true to itself; is not what it says it is

I think that the 3d work looks fake so should only be about the fake stuff - play it for laughs - as that is what our perception systems do when we see 3d used for News stories - we know they are not real and it seems funny that someone out there thinks that we might be fooled.

(It seems also that Apple Daily is coming under alot of pressure for its 'video reports'. You will need to use the translating function I imagine.(from Infographics news).)

 Gert Neilsen also comments about this.

 

This CO2 bubble chart is a typical Guardian bubble chart style. It is a decent chart and the colours are very engaging. Nice.

Then there was this one a while ago.

This one is less a graphic - more an op-ed piece  - don't get me wrong - it's good to have visual op-ed (ask the NYT) but this graphic uses info-design vernacular (insinuated comparative volumes and presentation of hierarchy/ colour code) to make it's fun point - ( maybe I need to lighten up ). But in being accessible and fun, it failed to tell us how many people are on different wages etc - the list on the page is v interesting - answers the 'where am I?' question.

But the following is really not that good - some cut out shapes with a few volumetric bubbles - it's like some clip art got published accidentally - the pictographic effect may be fitting in tone for this data blog ares but it is a bit lazy looking - give us a list instead. (Does though make the one above look a lot more humane with plenty of people and faces.)

 
Is there an assumption that any data is worth visualising? 

Probably - but in my view,  information on it's own is not beautiful - but the articulation and editing of information certainly is in with a chance.

So come on Guardian - do the good stuff.

This month's graphic for WWII Magazine looks at the lesser known MP3008. It was a German submachine-gun, drafted into minimal use at the end of the war. It was an insalubrious end for the fine craft heritage of German WWII weaponry - although this attention to technical detail was not tenable.

The graphic started life as a general family tree of many other submachine guns. This type of weapon was invented in WWI, but many variants were used in WWII. I wanted to show the main developments, color coded by country.

As soon as i decided that the MP3008 was th focus I deleted all guns not related. This meant getting rid of the US Finnish and Russian guns - which i am sure i will come back to.

I then thought to add data on the global resources available to build weapons, but it split the page too much.

The magazine editor Bill and his staff felt that the page needed a focus. They felt that a system diagram such as a family tree did not give the reader enough of a starting point.

There was far too much working this out on the page - something I am trying to get away from - that is what sketchbooks are for!

Al these are trying to resolve the need to point at the Main Object - the MP3008 - which is on the left - not the normal place people start to read.

Then, I decided to add detail on the operation of the gun - this added a new variable to the graphic - already tense with competing focal demand - especially the UK and German Timelines, which were not quite working out - until below:

Below is the art file I send to the magazine - it looks a little naked.

This piece had people in it like many of the newer ones. I wanted to show the progression from static warfare to mobile SMG warfare - to the fellow crouched down, waiting for it to stop. I quite like the place-holding sketch - maybe i should have kept it?

Drawing the weapons

I started off doing line drawings with a plain white fill.

I then wanted to fill them, bringing them a more informal style, with some fairly broad brush strokes - away from the technical illustration gradients and 3d renders that permeate elsewhere.

Colour coding

I kept some of the principles of the assigned colour following the relevant parts throughout. I also started to use 'bitten' lines - with white either side to direct the label better.