The Rise of The Tower Graphic

You will need to scroll quite  a bit in this post. (when the page has finally loaded)

 

Sorry about that - but at least it illustrated nicely what I mean by a Tower Graphic.

I've just had a chat with the excellent Tom Pearson.  He is a software engineer at BBC News and when he mentioned what he called 'Tumblr Graphics', I was reminded of these massive things I've been seeing online.

You will have seen them in many blogs, everywhere in fact. Phil Gyford rightly lampooned the majority of them here.

Tom mentioned that they are 'Tumblr' in style - i like that phrase  - they certainly acknowledge the scroll of a screen. (which to me must be better than the next, next, next, of many 'paginated' graphics.) I thought I'd call them 'tower' as that may speak to the megalomaniacal glee with which many seem to have been executed.

 
They are bloody everywhere.

Typically taking up several screen-depths, they are rarely structured, with the exception of a unifying subject and background colour and typically stylish 'style-guide'.

But-it cannot be all bad can it?  If the purpose of structure is to direct to content, the user already knows that to scroll will enable that, so why shouldn't the designer concentrate on the information- elements on this expansive canvas, rather than mangling them through some clever trope?

Every time I try to hate these, I imagine people who are just interested in the facts finding them easy to use. (albeit hard to search and re-size etc etc).

This immediate gratification is something quite satisfying. Tom mentioned it is echoed in the production of flash movies which bake in all  their content - the baking-in helping their sendability and virality. Often these tower graphics comment on popular ideas, again, making them sendable social currency. Other baked in stuff, going against the open, searchable text principles are the explosion of informative videos like here

Dan Hill writes that Video is rapidly becoming the pre-eminent mode for communication of ideas (just as everyday photography is increasingly becoming video too).

Anyone in telly may say that this is not so new - but I think that for those at the cutting edge of say, design (like dan), to be using good old fashioned video says something about a want for universal understanding (go on , read dans post, it features some cracking work)

These tower graphics and videos are going against themassive complexity of other modern data-vis too.  They are rejecting the pull of making expert interfaces for experts and awards panels, leaving the average user blank. I like that there are some new simple forms - like these old, archetypal USA Today graphics. (but will I ever love them? probably not - but I 'quite like' baked beans - I don't need to love them)

I am not sure of their intention - I am deeply suspicious of many designer's motives in using the motifs of information design to add backbone to their flimsy scribbles. But some of these are quite good. Lots of shite TV doesn't make Mad Men unwatchable.

*Wait a minute* I hear myself say, we did one for 9/11 - showing who was on which floor. I think it is still conceptually sound but I would say that.

More interesting is that the NYT, and BBC andElpais are now using large single page graphics online - using the whole page - rather than paginating. Nice and simple - seems good. But there may be a flip side:

I think the use of these, first published in the paper and/or videos (maybe ripped from any TV video news graphics) will push back on the need for those 'web-skills' - of useful visualising and interaction design skills, that have been a little squandered in ornate visualisations. (With many media outlets looking to save costs, the online design people had better start thinking of their ROI. News sites have never used these full page graphics much before and this is new.)

From El Pais:

 

From NYT

 

So - much as there is a lot to dislike, they shine a light on the place I am most interested in these days - how you get most people to understand something. Not your design pals, not awards juries but normal people.

These are brutish and unsophisticated and I am sure that the public deserves better, but they have they have the balls to gatecrash the haughty party of modern information visualisation - and that is good.

I'm starting a new job soon - more in another post - and I think I'll start blogging more - there is an increasing amount happening in information design.

Comments

[Dan]

As an everyday user w/o much graphic sense I think they're very practical: ever try to scroll a screen sideways? And don't even get me started on videos; the minute I see "watch the video to learn how to....." I leave.

[Iain Anderson]

Videos contain little information compared to print or web sources. Just compare any video news story transcript to a web article on the same topic. The vast majority of the time, you don't get any useful information from seeing people speak, and a couple of pics alongside the text can give the visual information you might need.

[Dan Hill]

Thanks for the kind words, mate.

I think something else to mention here is the ease of scrolling these days, as a mode of navigation - due to multi-touch on iPad/iPhone etc., or on trackpad on a laptop (double-finder vertical swipe) or via the scroll wheel on mouse. That's changed things hugely, I think, as you're no longer navigating towards tiny buttons on the side of a browser window, which even with Fitt's Law in mind was a hassle. So that's changed the game, I think. I'm designing a website for Domus magazine at the moment which will take advantage of the vertical scroll (hopefully) though no tower graphics.

As to the couple of comments here about video, I understand the context of the piece is information design, but to say that videos don't deliver much information (Ian) is a little odd. Would you say that about film? To say that there's little "information" in, say, 'The Godfather Part II' would be quite bizarre. But more importantly, video/film evokes, captures, compels (in a multi-sensory way too) and that's what makes it interesting ... but I understand that's different to information design as traditionally practiced.

[Jindofox]

Dan, there's a huge difference between web video and film.

I think the commenters are thinking about people who embed YouTube videos for product unboxings or general nattering when a few well-commented still photos would suffice. In this case, video is used as a lazy technologicial shortcut for writing something clearly.

Godfather 2 is in no way a lazy shortcut, and is a fine example of video used artfully and appropriately.

[Guy]

True fact: apparently lots of these infographics are just thrown together by dodgy organisations to try and get traffic from Reddit, Digg, etc. The story of one man's job doing just that is here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_game_digg_using_infographics_voting/

[Iain Anderson]

It's not that informational videos can't deliver information, it's that they don't usually deliver as much information as a well written, carefully illustrated article. There's a really good reason that informational motion graphics videos are widely linked to: they're rare, and hard to make well. (There's much more that can go wrong.)

Yes, a video can deliver a message quite powerfully, but the time and subtlety it takes to do a good job is much harder in video than in the written word. Same in live action and in animation.

And no, I wouldn't say that about (good) film. The point of feature films is not to deliver information, and the aesthetic and emotional pull a film provides is not important when delivering information.

My major criticism here is directed towards news broadcasts and the majority of instructional videos -- especially the staggering number of pointless, unedited talking head videos on YouTube. While I recognise that everyone has a different learning style, I can't see how simply watching someone's lips move is a benefit.

BTW, I do write training material, tutorial articles and create video tutorials professionally. I can write a script for a video in a fraction of the time it takes to capture and edit a tutorial, and while a well crafted informational video does bring a great deal over and above a script, many, many videos are just visual filler while you listen to someone speak. Writing a good article is harder than just writing a script (it's longer!) but not as time consuming as making a good video.

A poorly planned, unedited screen capture video? Horrible. Zero Punctuation? Awesome.

[Guy]

Or as depicted in an infographic (!) here:

http://www.worldtech24.com/business/spam-infographic-about-spam-infographics-makes-my-head-hurt

[Dan Hill]

Ta ... I'm not referring to that kind of video (screen captures, unboxings etc.) but to the work of BERG or Matsuda as discussed in my post: http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2010/09/contingent-films-berg-dentsu-keiichi-matsuda.html (referred to by Max above) That is "web video" (if you like) that has the conditions of film (to a large extent). That's what I was getting at (and I think Max was too?) ...

[jess]

I feel partly responsible for success of tower graphics as I have been doing them for years now, but I don't think there is anything to worry about. It's just content fitting its form. If the web allowed for easy horizontal scrolling or easy embedding of large wide images, you would see more infographics fitting that space. But right now, there is no elegant way to do that. If blogs allowed for full screen width content, you would see that, but they don't. So tower graphics fit their space like a square peg in a square hole.

It's not like we look at this blog post and say, "wow its a tower article' because its one long column.

[Michael Wenyon]

I had not realized how tall web pages had gotten until I turned my NEC 27" screen through 90° into portrait format. Even in that orientation, home pages for NY Times and BBC News are both two screenfulls high, beyond the capacity of any existing display. And the sight of such a tall web page is a surprise when you see it, even though you should know it must be that high from the amount of scrolling you do. For most web users, the scrolled page is now the reality, not a truncation of something otherwise whole.

When we made this tall web artwork in 1996, a professional designer told us it broke every rule about good page design:
http://wengam.com/online_works/bookworks_inc_index/fakes.html

[Max Gadney]

I'm getting some good feedback which i think i'll put into another post on the subject.

[Stefaan]

Interesting graphics, if only the information was accurate. Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT Computer and Nexstep OS, the ancestor of the current Mac OS X.

[John Blackburne]

What I like about these graphics is the same thing I like about the page of well formatted text. The reader is in control of the speed and order they process the information. The problem with videos is they present information at a fixed speed. That speed is usually slow to cover a wide range of abilities to process information. Presenting the information on a single page as a slideshow similarly slows it down to the loading speed, with sometimes extra slowness added by designers as transitions to force you to linger.

[Matt Ryan]

I'm not bothered by tower graphics any more than I am bothered by longish articles. The real issue here is quality, and, as your post illustrates, tower graphics are no different from text online. There are junky, attention-grabbing tower graphics the same way there are junky, attention-grabbing blog posts (think "17 Signs You Are A Whatever" lists). There are high quality, well-researched, and information-rich tower graphics the same way there are high-quality, well-researched, and information-rich blog posts and articles. In both cases there is a lot more crap than there is quality, but when has that not been true in almost any medium?

[Álvaro Valiño]

Thanks for sharing your opinions, Max

[Dorian Fraser Moore]

Great post Max.

I think @steffan has nailed part of the problem with tower graphics/infographcs being used to support an article: they don't support it, they overwhelm it, and the depth and meaning of the article is lost.

Anecdotally I feel that this is down to a laziness in how people are taught about graphics (and video) where they are perceived to be equally rich to reading about a subject, not that each medium conveys information differently and has it's own purpose, hence they believe that by understanding the graphic they don't need to read the article. Kind like like paper, scissors, stone. Cue a new game for information designers, "video, graphics, text"

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