a screen on the lead up...
The Issue
The New York times recently showed a click through explainer of the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. I think they were wrong to do this. They were wrong on terms of taste and decency and they also they missed a chance to do some good journalism.
A variety of factors combine to make this disturbing. By understanding these elements (be they accidental or intentional) we as practioners in the media can maybe not repeat this.
You may choose to see the graphic here (it's unsettling, shows a man seconds before death)
Taste and decency
User implication
One disturbing effect is the users implication in this scene. By clicking through the 8 steps of the interactive guide, we whisk the man to his demise. We are then left with the final screen, whose tragic, kinetic image is the final take- out. There is no aftermath - even some (obvious maybe, but - hey) flowers or a photo could have acted as a memorial.
Point of view
Throughout the piece, the luger travels in our direction, then in the last stages, he flies towards us, dying in front of us, not hidden away from us in the distance. He almost dies in our laps.
Clarity of final image
The images that lead up to this are fuzzy, blurry, with the yellow line and cc tv shot helping us undertand the position of the Luger. The final one is in a radically different mode- of clarity - not the more acceptable vaguary of the run up. If anything, the vaguary should have been kept for the final portrayal of his death, if that portrayl is required at all.
Modal leaps
Slick 3D representations of the course (a decent use of 3d - ice, steel, man-made fibres) lull us into an unreal, schematic world, where we will be shown representations of things - not the things themselves. The final photo jumps out of this un-reality and is more realistic and visceral for it.
Historical precendent
Public interest often demands that significant deaths be shown. The human condition demands we confront death - often when the deceased is well known or it is part of a significant event. If neither is the case - as with this, the public may ask why they are being shown it. Their need for confronting these matters is replaced by an intrusive, unpleasant sensation that although impactful is unwelcome and hollow.
Journalism
I my mind, the main issue was his impact - into a metal pole/support - and why that was there. This is the missed opportunity - an investigation into what other options were and their safety record. My dad mentioned that in his wild youth when he did the bobsleigh, they used a combination of drift snow, pine branches and man made barriers (all softer than a metal beam).
This graphic has focussed on the What rather than the Why or How, so is just showing, rather than explaining. The thing is that showing this is not really very necessary or nice.
The lack of insight leaves sour taste.
I hope there is a discussion about that at Malofiej this year. I won't be there I'm afraid (we have a new baby who is a bit young for the Jumping Jester after-parties). But it is important and needs discussing.
Issues within (and pictures) explored in this excellent post too.
Cheers Tom.
This month's graphic for WWII magazine is about US aircraft carriers. Some say the US fought a naval war, one of large naval battles and amphibious landings (including many in Europe).
Drawing the carrier happened after assembling iPhone pics from a book
I knew that somewhere would be a diagram of the carrier. I knew I had to do a general tour of key areas and ideas rather than 200 specific features. Some of these are fascinating - the 'ready room' for fliers, the split engines to avoid hits, the protective wall around the fuel tanks. Invariably in such a massive system there is a temptation to get stuck in the detail so I had to zoom out a bit to find the actual story.
This was settled on as concentrating on the Essex class carrier and it's hasty and timely entry into service.
I wanted to show the effect the Essex had on the
Pacific carrier war by graphing the following variables:
- Post December 1941 - time
- US and Japanese carriers commissioned, sunk,
damaged, repaired, capacity of carriers
So that you can see at any one time how many carriers and ultimately planes, the opposing forces could send at each other. This was something I wanted the piece to stress - that naval power was now about mobility of aerial force, not firepower and armour.
The sketch of the wave concept
The first graph was about aerial force but in a different way - I sought to show the changing balance of planes - from anti-ship torpedo and dive bombers in the early days when the main objective was destroying other ships - to fighter planes, whose main job was to defend against the kamikazes in the final months.
Here is where I got temporarily distracted by a motif. (I sure I am not the first designer to think I have had a moment of conceptual brilliance, only ditch it after a lot of self-discipline and asking the honest opinions of others.)
I really liked the concept of this fighter make up shown as a wave.
It fitted the nautical theme. It symbolised the crushing might of US industrial output. Best of all it referenced the Japanese artist Hokusai whose Great Wave off Kanagawa is a well-known piece.
It also went with the headline "Launching a steel tsunami" which I was pleased with. (Alliterative headlines provide a simple warm glow to me)
Thus began an internal dilemma of being happy with the visual motif, yet being uncomfortable with it as a means of carrying information.
Cute but faulted
It was faulty - the area if the inner curve is way less than the outer, distorting the quantitative impression in favour if the outer. (and rendering this with illustrator offset path created loads of duplicates of the vector and overloaded my mac - so there's a tip!)
More importantly, it didn't contribute to a strong story idea - "balance of plane types changed to echo changing strategy/tactics" is ok - but " the Essex carrier helped win the pacific war" is better - so I ditched the wave and went for the other graph as it told a bigger story better.
I deleted the vertical grid - it made too much noise - although it did help with the positioning when drawing the graph
This graph worked ok- some issues were-
- Data - lots of contradictory data meant a lot of work
between the magazine and I to get it right (thanks Caitlin)
- Overlapping lines - I decided that if there were two
lines overlapping, the top one would be the one that was at the most advantage
at that time
- Tour points - worth mentioning that doing a graph
with tonnes of data isn't good enough - key points need pointing out - in this
case, key battles and main themes (lots of data-vis these days just throws data
at the wall and asks you to ‘play’ with it, without direction – which is why
most people don’t.) Take a Tour.
Out of interest - the featured carrier is the USS Intrepid - which is in New York City - go and see it - I'll return after doing this with new stuff to look at for sure.
This book is out now. Information is Beautiful is a collection of many visualisations of data - on lots of different subjects.
I met David McCandless the other day and we both share the view that if you are in the business of information design - and are serious about your form-giving, you should seek to do something with it apart from just 'data art'.
It's a good sentiment. That's why I'll buy this book.
The book took a long time to do (a solid year apparently) - but the thing that shines is that the time it took would have been to understanding the data and stories.
They are rendered economically but humanely. They are boldly coloured for sure - where some may prefer NYT sobriety - but colour is nice - they are the closest I have seen to smart mass-market graphics in a long time. If only most of our journalists in the UK had a fraction of this visual smarts.
So I'll be buying a copy and if you know people who work with a lot of text and information, get them a copy - this book is infinitely more likely to make sense to them and show them a way forward than most info-vis stuff about today.
Noteworthy also...
David also created The Helicopter Game which caused me a major Remembering-doing-nothing-but-playing The-Helicopter-Game flashback when I visited it again - cool.
I found this Italian site with tonnes of cutaways the other day.
Cutaways seem a popular search term.
There are other cutaways (tanks, submarines) but it is mostly planes.
Back to work.
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).)
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.
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.
