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US Aircraft Carriers, WWII Magazine, Mar-Apr 2009

 
 

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.  

Information is Beautiful by David McCandless

 Amazon.co.uk
 
 

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'. 

this graphic from his blog
 

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.

Airplane Cutaways

 

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.

The Trouble with Information Graphics 1

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.

Tiger Woods Impro-graphics

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.

Some Guardian Graphics

When I used to hire designers I saw a lot if portfolios. One common comment was "this portfolio looks like it was done by different people." This was when the standard of the work used to be inconsistent

I see similar traits in the Guardian at the moment. They are generally very sound and are to be respected for dragging UK papers into the 21st century design-wise, but I see some inconsistency.

 

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 makeshift MP3008, SMGs, WWII Magazine, Nov 2009

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.

DESIGNNET Magazine Feature

Designnet is South Korea's top Design magazine, so I was pretty flattered to be interviewed for their Information Design special report in the recent issue.

Nice to see the articles prominently featured.

Me in South Korean.

Bit of a rubbish photo but you get the message.(better ones to come)

Below are the comments I sent about each included spread.

It was a challenge to sum up one insight about each article - but here goes (I have linked to the blog entries)

Subject: Flak Fills the Sky
Client:  WW2 Magazine
Date of Issue: September 2009
Description: At a glance, the magazine reader can sense the subject from the compositional essence of the gun crew on the 'ground' and the data in the 'sky'

Subject: The Spitfire's Finest Hour
Client:  WW2 Magazine
Date of Issue: November 2009
Description: : The main illustration signposts the subject matter, using technical drawing for the planes and expressive humane lines for the people.    

Subject: The Norden Bombsight
Client: WW2 Magazine
Date of Issue: January 2009
Description: The colour-coding of the line-drawing introduces a consistent syntax for the rest of the spread.

Subject: The Birth Of The Assault Rifle
Client: WW2 Magazine
Date of Issue: November 2007
Description: Multiple variables are presented on the 'range graph' while sensitive use of color draws attention to the key data.

Here is some of the text I sent for the piece, in response to their questions - 

On graphics in different media...

Information graphics in the mass media are different to those in specialist media. Mass media graphics need to signal the subject of the content to the reader who can then choose whether to engage. They then need to balance this signpost with the finer resolution data to provide a balance of access points and layers of content. Broadcast graphics need to attract and also keep attention. They typically use a lower resolution of data, but can tell complex relational stories, more like text, over time. Web graphics also need to start with a basic signpost or instruction and then allow user to explore the data for themselves.

On colour...

Designers need to make sure not to create unintentional relationships between elements due to Ill considered use of type and colour. Colouring elements the same colour is the best way to communicate a relationship between them. Readers will assume an intention behind groupings of elements. Use desaturated colours for large areas and most of the data - bright colours should be used only to highlight the most important elements in the story.

On being a credible designer...

Designers often moan that people don't respect them when they do little to earn it. The only way to gain the respect of journalists or any client is to understand their business and the subject. News designers will not have respect of their journalistic colleagues unless they can discuss the stories in the news with authority. The more they understand about the subject, the more they can suggest which subjects will need visual explanation. Some call this discipline 'visual reporting' - whatever it is, when it works, it is the harmony between an original idea for a story and the means to tell it visually.

Thanks to Mina at Designnet for her help. And thanks to the team at WWII magazine - their editing makes these what they are.

NYT Innovation Portfolio? Told you so...

A few years ago, I gave a talk at the Malofiej Conference about some nascent user research and design principles of graphics at BBC News. 

I concluded that :

a) design teams that do not understand their users will not be able to provide for them (still true but obvious)

and 

b) it is the design team (or indeed any respective department ) that needs to know it's value to the business (obvious to design companies - but less so to in-house departments)

They need to know why are people engaging with Their output? - and how much does it bring in? - they are not a 4 piece chamber quartet sat in the newsroom/ marketing dept playing accompaniments to afternoon tea after all.

...I noticed someone in the crowd (nameless, but by no means shameless) laughing/ shaking his head at this idea that designers need to know what ROI they provide to the business.

So it is interesting to see that the NYT are now doing exactly that (and not just with design but other NYT items/ products) - providing a portfolio of their work for advertisers to see minutes spent and numbers of users engaging.(nice place to bring it all together too - also speaks of the difficulty that news sites have in keeping all their timeless good stuff on show, before it is washed away by the daily stuff -  although it is maybe only industry folk who need it so?)

Creative industry workers are really bad at measuring the effectiveness of their work. Most would rather not risk it I reckon - best to just get on with it and avoid bright lights shone on you? 

Well, money concerns  are happening to journalism and can happen anywhere else - so it may time to consider your value to your business. Go and talk to the accounts department - they may have some ideas on how to do this - talk to anyone - before the auditors talk to you and you have no answer because you are 'just a designer'.

NYT Innovation Portfolio first seen on Chiqui Esteban's Infographics News

BBC Sport Online - Designer Post

As Scott said 

"BBC Sport Editorial / Visual Designer position is being advertised. For people interested in infographics and sport"

Apply Here