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Data Flow - Book Review

2008-11-20T23:58:16+00:00

Brief Review

Data Flow is nicely produced and shows Information/ Data Visualisation from the more decorative part of the spectrum.

Reading it is less instructional than a rigorous Tufte tome but if it makes others think of this area as a place they would like to work then that cannot be bad.

And It is important to balance one's rigour with some vigour - and this book supplies alot of energy and enthusiasm.

Let me tell you why - Longer Review

Initially was a bit unsure of this book but I have come round to it. Having thought about why that is, I have realised that this book sums up quite alot about my career as a designer.

My past was at BBC News, where we had a definite purpose and the brand values called for a no-nonsense approach to the interaction and information design problems at hand.

We were also a team learning about this as we went along. Matt had got us off to a cracking start - both product-wise and in the ideals of a design team and we continued the task of user-centred approaches that frequently clashed with the editorial and technical teams. These clashes gradually became constructive conversations and we developed an excellent culture together.

During that time, in the industry there was a discussion going on about Usability and Desirability. Can a website look nice and serve it's purpose? A millenial Form and Function debate etc etc.

Most designers we interviewed would be either side of that fence - either really tight and task focussed UI-people and pretty un-visually minded - or vice versa.

I think I started to judge this book with a Tufte/ Nielsen dogma (an excellent voice to have in the room by the way). I was initially annoyed at it's lack of critical faculty - but on closer inspection, It does some sound things.

It does include work that is pure in it's pursuit of pure communication of the information and the best of this does so in some new and good ways.

There is also some work that plays with the concepts of both the form of data graphics. This book favours the experimental over the mainstream.

It has some which look towards data vis being an art form in itself. I suppose that no-one said it always needs to communicate information only.

I initially bristled at the thought of information as art - but if it is good enough for the Dadaists. . .

For any of us working in the media/ mainstream markets with our visual information work, we need to remember that visual interest is an important consideration.

It is perhaps a little easy to embrace an 'information only' scowl that excludes any consideration of aesthetics beyond a grudging simplicity. Yes, the data can be beautiful in it's pure composition and synthesis of meaning - but also, we are human and there is an irrational need for fun, visual wit and emotion - depending on the subject and audience.

But having said that I do think there is some work in here which is a bit scribbly. I think that some people are just using data as this months style filter. But I'll save that for a post when I'm feeling more acidic.

I personally would like to see some examples from the mainstream - NYT (or BBC!) but these may have blunted this books cutting edge credentials (like graduates who don't want to do 'corporate stuff' ).

If anything that could have shown newcomers of the mass market value of this work done well. It's a missed chance but not the end of the world.

A good example is the featured piece by Stamen - their fab taxi work. I wonder if they would have included their transport work - one of my favourite pieces of online info vis ever. simple and useful - but for this book - again - maybe not 'cool' enough?

final thoughts . . .

I'm not really into the page architecture design - seems to attract too much attention - but I would say that. It is nicely printed - the resolution supports lots of the intricacy of the work and it doesn't have a dust jacket - I'm very down on them at this moment.

This is a good audit in book form of the 2008, Planet Earth state of Data Visualisation.

if you don't want to buy one, there are websites at the side that deal with this stuff.

Infoaesthetics is a good one for a rounded view of this area.

Information Design Association Talk. London. Dec 2.

2008-10-30T00:25:31+00:00

The above was a cover from the Guardian G2 supplement. The sad thing is that they are right.

The IDA have invited me to do a talk at the Design Council, London, on Information Graphics in the News.

It's on Tuesday December 2, 2008 at 6:30pm.

I may give more detail before the day but it won't be a 'my-portfolio' piece - I hope to ask some questions about what works at the moment and what does not.

Hope to see you there.

WWII Fighter Plane Armament

2008-10-17T17:52:14+01:00

This month's graphic compares different armaments from fighters in the WWII European Air War.

The aircraft are armed according to purposes that changed throughout the war e.g. we can see that German fighters at the end of the war were armed with heavier calibre weapons so the could shoot down the bombers over their homeland.(And the US fighters that defended these bombers only needed a lighter calibre MG round for their primary task - destroying fighters.)

Editorial Issues

There were many factors to a plane's lethality - not least the experience of the pilots - this a factor that did for the Luftwaffe in 1944 as the Allies began to destroy oil and planes used for training. But I was going to concentrate on the calibres of weapons that differed in the air powers.

Point of View

I wanted to give an idea of how much armament each plane carried.

Some books show the weight of rounds fired through the air.

One could also argue that the cannon shells had explosive filling and so their effectiveness wasn't just down to mass or velocity.

Others discuss the benefits of lighter MG rounds that can travel further at a higher rate and so can lay more fire on a target, against the slower but heavier cannon rounds that fell shorter and at a lower rate of fire.

I just decided that in the interests of an understandable graphic, the calibre size and number of guns would be highlighted, with the text explaining the issues around these choices.

Design Issues

From the start I wanted to show life-size calibres of these weapons.

Ideally we would have had them punching holes through the paper, but this would prove too costly.

We worked out that the pages on the other side - that you looked through to - would need to be heavily text based so that the holes would show a (ground )texture very different to the 'figure' of the page.

The idea for life-sized holes came to me earlier on in the graphic that compared key WWII tanks.

I tried quite a few experiments with showing life sized calibres

there but the circles had too much overlap

and the information was hard to read. It also lost the punchiness of being a darker hole in the paper and became (aesthetically pleasing -

but not very useful) blobs.

So with the calibre graphic, i started out showing the holes separately, easily labelled and comparable - showing how many weapons each plane had of which calibre. I laid them out along a horizontal axis that shows the war years - a decent canvas for comparing technologies.

I then colour coded them

And then wanted to add more data and this required that i overlaid the calibre-holes where possible -

and then in order to add a signpost to the graphic - to show at a glance what it was about, I added plane silhouettes. The earlier tank graphic could have done with these just to let people know what they were getting - without proving too much of a distraction

I was quite happy with this - but the editorial team at the magazine felt that some of the calibres were getting hard to read - they had a good point. We also wanted to try the real-holes-in-the-paper so we came up with this arrangement.

There is the added benefit in that there is now the space to include other data abut these planes, including range and speed. It was a nice way to prototype using a mixture of scanned pencil sketch and some elements in Adobe Illustrator just to point out how some of the elements would look.

The use of these icons to show the common targets was also carefully considered. I was lucky enough to discuss in a day long tutorial by Scott McCloud that an harmonising elements (eg colour or background shapes) should not take anything from the recognition/ reading of the actual shapes/ symbols. I figured that the ones in circles looked like the real thing but didn't read as well - so out they came.

Cutaways in Information Graphics

2008-10-09T22:03:07+01:00

I have been wanting to talk about cutaways for a while and there is so much to them that this will just be getting some thoughts in order - one of many posts on general Information Graphics issues.

I was walking to work this morning and I walked past a Fire Station, where one of the engines was out the front with all it's side panels up.

I could see all the stuff inside and I went round the other side and a confused fireman said I could take a picture.

It's a real life diagram of where everything is kept.

There are no lines, or 3D or clever pencilling - this is what it is. In many graphics there is alot of stuff that we seem to put in the way pf explainations when a simple photo will do.

I'm not going to go to the effort of labeling it all but you could see where this could have gone.

And it is also important to not have it floating in white space, but subtley edited, still in context, yet highlighted.

Anyway.

When I got to work I had a look at a soon to be published book of Eagle Comic Cutaways that we had been sent.

They hold a lot of charm in their nostalgic qualities, possibly the visual equivalent of childhood smells, yet - (sorry to ruin the magic here John - I know you're a fan) - they slightly miss the point when it comes to explaining things.

By putting all their eggs in the Cutaway basket, they miss out on the purposes and invention of the tech that they celebrate. The one above does feature a little of extra info - but there is little doubt what the main event is.

A cutaway is a basic graphic - the state of things made clear, like a graph with one variable of data, rather than seeking to draw comparison, reasoning, correlation or causation. The danger is that they celebrate the basic rendering rather than information imparting. They are doubtlessly beautiful but I wonder to what end.

Weirdly enough, here is a fire engine (there wasnt one in the book) by the most famous artist of eagle cutaways Leslie Ashwell Wood. (for sale if you want)

He also did some very interesting WWII illustrations - here on the UK national Archives site. You can zoom in and see the paint/ gouache/ white-out. V.cool.

They are fantastic. So maybe I have been a bit hard on them.

I'll leave the final word to a pal, Jack Schulze, who bought me in to talk graphics with his students at the Central a few years ago.

I showed them this NYT graphic for the Gulf War II - they apparently bought up a load of technical illustrators in the US for this period.(NYT fans should check Shan Carter's site too)

It is an Apache Gunship and in the paper you can see every nut and bolt.

Jack said "What am I going to do? Build one?"

I like that comment - on the one hand it shows the futility of showing that amount of detail to the average reader - yet it belies the reasons that people (especially tech minded ones) like cutaways - because they are not reading about where an engine is on a rocket ship - they are dreaming about building one.

The Tiger Tank, WWII Magazine, August 2008

2008-09-23T17:06:14+01:00

This graphic seeks to highlight the weaknesses of the Tiger Tank, to demystify one of the much heralded technologies of WWII.

There was no doubt that the Tiger tank, with ample fuel and on solid ground, was one of the most lethal vehicles of the war. Tiger tanks have symbolised the Ruthless Nazi Juggernaut in movies and popular culture.

Editorial Issues

The books of Thomas Jentz contain a lot of original and deep research, including some fascinating data from ballistics tests involving captured Tiger armour - it was these data that the left hand side graphic was based on.

It is fair to argue that these data are obtained in non-battlefield conditions, but the important thing for me, editorially is that the shed light on the idea that although the Tiger was the superior against all tanks of its day, those that came after had learned lessons, and by improving calibre and barrel length, guns could penetrate it's armour (leading to the further up-armouring to the Tiger 2).

One could also argue that I haven't included enough of the different types of projectile that would have different effects on the armour. This data has been excluded for expediency - the role of this graphic is to afford a basic understanding of the issue. This is something I am thinking a lot more about - is the initial impact of a graphic enough? and then we depend on text for the depth? - or how far can purely visual means go towards telling a compelling story, with many angles and complexity? (Answers to come in future posts)

Design Issues

The main issue here was the translating the tabular data into a graphic that showed two variables at once - the distance that A could lethally hit B and vice versa.

Maybe this should have happened in the sketch book but is was so sure that I had the right elements that I allowed myself to buck that principle

I started of with the tanks facing each other - this way I could have also kept a vertical or horizontal scale to show the progression of time /dates - a construct that is becoming increasing popular in this work as so much of it is about one side's ability to improve before the other.

Illustrations shown at early stages - dummy text etc

As the above pictures show a few experiments that were done with this element but the final version is better at conveying the Tiger's role as target/ the focus of this composition.

The page was more colour coded to begin with (using the colour scheme for the beligerent countries -

Basic colour codes for belligerent nations (anyone got suggestions for France, Italy or Japan?)

I considered using red text for the whole of the 'weaknesses' section, but further work showed it to be too much - such a surfeit of colour would be meaningless and would break a fundamental graphic rule - that bright colours are for highlighting important elements and are to be used sparingly.

Sample layout showing over-exuberant use of red text

The rendering of the tanks was interesting too - the representation of hardware is an ongoing concern. I am aware that there will be some readers who would like to see these machines portrayed in all their technical actuality, but my initial view was that they only need to be portrayed to support the needs of the editorial thrust of the graphic.

I have come round a little to the needs of the graphic to have a degree of visual richness - one of the graphic's purposes must be to attract and retain interest of the viewer's eye.

Different treatments of the tanks - which aid recognition and also keep the eye interested?

This is often frowned upon is some circles of information design - but short of full blown realism, there are positive qualities in the competent line rendering of these objects - just as in this pterosaur illustration in the NYC Natural History Museum.

Pterosaur display illustration, NY Museum of Natural History

The Lines are efficient in their communication of 'pterosaur-ness' but it doesn't seek to become fully rendered or realised and it is this level of render that i am keen on at the moment - unless of course the editorial thrust demanded a critique of an aspect of the engineering/ construction.

More on this approach to line drawing in future posts.

Wordle War II - Visualising Texts

2008-07-01T19:35:48+01:00

Although my postings refer to information design for print, there is a lot of interesting work in online (information/ data) visualisation.

You can see a bunch of them here at Information Aesthetics.

This basically involves the designer/ engineer creating an ongoing design system to show patterns and hierarchies. It needs flexibility above and beyond what can be frozen on a printed page and all this while dealing with the need for the user to interact with this data too, after an initial overview. (I personally think an initial orientation is important - and then the ability to drill down - others do not and seem to revel in initial complexity.)

One method used to show links associated with a website is the tag cloud. And there is a new website called Wordle that lets you make similar typographic arrangements based on the text from any given source.

These are actually visual displays of words that appear often in a body of text and so an indicator of what is important to the author. I put the contents of the current wikipedia WWII page through it and the results are here.

My first thoughts are that it is good to see the word Soviet so prominent, the USSR often being disproportionately represented by much western media on the war. Japan is surprisingly prominent - I wonder if that indicates a US-leaning view of the war (much of the US involvement was the massive Pacific-wide naval and amphibious war with Japan). And interesting to see China so much more prominent than in the books I grew up with.

Wordle is not an analytical tool and to be so would need to stress sentence and grammar intention and structure and context etc etc but it is a lot of fun and will do a serious job of bringing these concepts to a larger audience. It is easy to use and if you want to find out about the creator, here is his blog.

I should mention the work of Stefanie Posavec if you want to look at further visual patterns within text.

I tried a few others - Wikipedia page Causes of WWII, and WWII Technology (Wikipedia again)

And in case anyone is interested, this site's Wordle cloud is like this.

V-3: The Vengeance Weapon - WWII Magazine - June/July

2008-04-30T00:11:36+01:00

The June_July Issue of WWII Magazine features a graphic about the last of the vengeance weapons that Hitler hoped would destroy Britain.

Design Issues
Signposting
Recent discussions with folks in the graphics industry have pointed me towards the need for better signposting. Like many people passionate about a subject, it is always tempting to afford equal importance to all elements. A balanced composition is one thing - but there should be no confusion as to what the subject or editorial thrust is.

Orientation
As well as the headline, the initial image and paragraph should tell us what the basics of the story are and what to expect from the graphic.

Scale
I haven't put a scale in many of these illustrations - it is often a reliable staple of lazy graphics - and in Britain, things always get compared to a double decker bus. It seems relevant here though as the size of this weapon is one of the reasons for it's failure - but also symbolic of Hitler's (and Nazi German) arrogance and extreme vision.

Sketch-Up
Tools wise, I am using Google Sketchup to make some of these elements - it's a great programme although sometimes distracting to use. You really need to know what you want t achieve when you start it up or you'll be there for hours.

Further reading
When in the states recently I came across this V-Weapons Sites book by Steven Zaloga. . It is pretty concise. Ill add some more books as the blog goes on.

It's a shorter post this time as I am just back from being away - lots to catch up on.

Kamikaze Deconstructed - WWII Magazine April/May 2008

2008-04-29T23:09:21+01:00

This graphic for WWII Magazine is concerned with the Kamikaze tactics employed by Japan during WWII.

Editorial Issues
Data Integrity
The graphic element at the bottom of the left hand page shows numbers of kamikazes. Due to the lack of proper records and confusion of these attacks, precise numbers are harder to come by but I think that the graphic here represents a s fair proportion of sunk ships to overall missions. One insight from doing this piece of work was that the deck-gunners and sailors on the US ships couldn't be 100% positive as to which was and wasn't a Kamikaze plane when they were at distance - as the escort planes would fly close to them and also act as unwitting decoys.

Selection of Planes
I wasn't exhaustive with the selection of all planes used in these missions for the same reasons of space and the fact that in their desperation , the Japanese used many many types of plane for this task. I mentioned others apart fro he Zero because it is important to challenge people's mental model of WWII - beyond that which they get from the mass media.

Demystification
I felt it important to point out the fallibility of much of the technology and tactics and to show that es, they did create chaos and death but ultimately they lost more than they gained.
I think this is one of the most important aspects of this work - especially as there is so much rubbish written about the superiority of Axis technology and troops. Yes - each side's military had it's strengths and weaknesses, but it is important to explain that this tactic was used because they were desperate - id they had plenty f planes, plenty of pilots and plenty of oil, they would have carried on with a more conventional form of defence I am sure (albeit more desperate the closer the lies got o the home islands. (Any non-S readers should check out The War - a documentary which is unashamedly US in it's outlook - although fair in it's assessment of the sacrifice of others (including the USSR). But even though we see various Hollywood films, the US story is not told in depth to the non-US citizen - so the War is a good place to start.

Design Issues
Themed Pages
In the work I am doing for the magazine and the book proposal, I am trying to introduce visual coding of the subject matter that should run throughout. It is done here with The use of the blue background - something I am trying to use for many of the aerial graphics - especial when the detail is concerned with the tactics of flying rather than just machinery. I will also continue the colour coding of the different belligerent powers - Green for USA, Khaki for UK, Red for USSR and Blue/ Grey for Nazi Germany. It is hard to evaluate whether it will work or whether it is worth doing until a larger body of work is built up and the graphics can be read as a series or at least related - no just by the subject material but by the basic building blocks that make them. It is odd to develop a style guide on the fly - as opposed to running into what many designers love doing - great big style guide 'bibles' - but I wonder that I don't have the full range of all the required variable s of such a guide in front of me yet - so I'm doing it as I go along.

Oversimplification
I felt that the crash tactics were pretty well explained with the three stage sequence on the right hand page but one issue was with what kind of treatment to show the impact. This is one of the few graphics (even though they all deal with parts of a catastrophic story) that shows mortal moments and I hope that they are shown sensitively.

Some (experts) could also argue that the proximity fuse is too simple - that it takes a lot of the operations of such a device for granted. I think that one needs to remember that the editorial gravity of the graphic is about kamikazes and so just as the Leigh Light deserves it's own spread from the Radar graphic - a call needs to made i the story telling and the call was that the Proximity fuse needed to explained simply.

Malofiej 16 Information Graphics Conference

2008-03-18T23:30:24+00:00

I’ve just got back from Malofiej16 in Spain. It is an Information Graphics conference run by the Society of News Design - Spanish Chapter – with a lot of credit going to Javier Errea, a Newspaper Design Director/ consultant who organises it. (He is also helped by the kind people at the University of Navarra, who also run a course that is possibly one of the principle reasons for Spain’s excellence in this field in the last 20 years or so.)

It’s an annual conference with two days of talks mainly centred on Information Graphics used in the news, but also with other subjects such as a truly fantastic talk a few years ago by Paul Mijksenaar on airport design.

I have decided not to show loads of pictures on this entry because I think they may detract from some of the summary of main points. (I won’t mention every speaker – other conference blogs do this – I don’t – and I am summarising my reflections on the speeches, rather than what was accurately said.)

Warring factions
Javier Errea made some sound points in his introduction. The main one was that by seeing an organ of communication (paper, magazine, website) as containing different types of devices (text, photo’s, graphics), one encourages these devices to compete and fight against each other. The writers don’t want graphics because it means less text and vice-versa. One could also argue that these disciplines would retreat within their own cultures even more and become stale.

Complimentary parts of the whole
He said one should instead regard the whole organ as a visual one, because that is how people are consuming it. Once this view is shared, al the means of communication acheive a finer balance and a better execution. The parts are all better linked and accessed and the experience is as a whole for both readers and employees.

(50%NYT) + (25%Clarin) …
Javier also mentioned how Information Graphics are becoming a little formulaic. I agree and I think there needs to be a little more activity across the whole spectrum of visual communication.

Motifs
One thing I saw was a further departure from the schematic/ diagrammatic (Nigel Holmes and John Grimwade as fine proponents ) towards two opposite ends of the spectrum-of-visual-communication.

1. Attack of the over-layed circles
The first was the ‘data-aesthetic’ as championed recently by the New York Times but also used in a more accessible manner by the Guardian, UK. A mate and I were just pondering the influence of the world of data that is the web on all this. It’s all good stuff and doesn’t get aped too much (you cannot if you don’t have the data – and lazy apers don’t tend to gather much data.)

2. Aaaggh it’s an atom splitting on front of me! – oh - it’s just a picture
The second was a move towards the illustrated hyper-real. I would say that the main difference between this work and totally-real 3D rendering is a knowingly aesthetic moment that reminds us that it is just a drawn picture on the page (the use of pencil, colour wash, light effects in atomic renders etc) and isn’t real. The National Geographic excel at this work, especially in their scientific illustration. I also have to credit the Nat Geo speaker, Sean, on a great talk and I can assure any subscribers that more effort goes into the veracity of their dinosaur illustrations than Mother Nature spent on thinking up dinosaurs in the first place.

Way high
This was one of the reminders for me on how high the standards of editorial integrity are at these places that get it right (NYT, National Geographic, El Mundo, Clarin, etc). It was inspiring listening to the excitement and entrepreneurialism exhibited by NYT reporters at finding out the details of the Virginia Tech massacre so their readers could understand this particular story in the best (most relevant) way our current media can offer.

Bart and Lisa and Mario too
Shan Carter spoke about creating digital graphics and the NYT approach. He mentioned how they see their audiences and this rang true with me. In both my jobs at the BBC, I put understanding the audiences highly. One of my favourite models was that of Mario Garcia, who mentioned that there are Scanners and Readers (in fact the same person in different modes. Shan’s slightly more fun version of this was Bart and Lisa – design for those who are Lazy and Nerdy. I liked this model too but you really need to be a New Yorker speaking to a bunch of Europeans to properly carry it off.

Turn it up to 11!
Michael Robinson (Graphics Director at the Guardian, UK) made a really nice comment about the need for Volume Control. I though this was a good way of talking about a palette and style guide and having worked in news I wondered how often he had to fend off requests such as ‘ yeah but my story is worth the big stuff etc etc’. But, I thought ‘volume control’ was a fine phrase because it alluded to an elusive finessing to sensitive subjects that transcends just colour or tone.

As regards an equivalent to the excellent ‘design is what you take out as much as put in”, Michael said “there’s no need to show the sea if you are talking about the land” – which I liked.

Know thy reader
The big issue constantly ignored at this and every other design conference is ‘does it bring in more readers?’/”will it make us more money?”. Javier mentioned that ‘graphics retain reader attention in surrounding text”, but I’d like more detail. Intelligent customer research is so hard to do that most people are exposed to bad customer research and designers being some of the smartest people at sniffing bullshit, give it a wide berth. This is unfortunate as designers are also innately often the most humane discipline in their consideration of human needs and so it makes sense of them to take more ownership of this process and ultimately their destinies.

Takeouts
My main learnings for the WWII work are that the standard of work out there is really high. I need to decide where on the visual spectrum of possibility my work for WWII needs to be. Recent conversations with the new editor have pointed to better signposting of the subject matter as one starting point but I am happy with the echoing of the editorial tone hat my more schematic/ less ‘real’ approach is taking. We are also in deep discussions about the work for the year ahead so I’m pretty excited.

Battling Through the Bocage - WWII Magazine, March 2008

2008-03-04T22:34:41+00:00

This months graphic explains how US forces overcame the bocage - Hedgerow country - of Normandy.

Editorial Issues
Independent Innovation
Although my article features the Culin hedgerow cutter, it is fair to say that faced with similar problems and with similar means of solving them, similar solutions appeared independently. The Culin cutter is one of the better recorded examples but there were a few types. Technology is often a result of human needs being met (when it is not blind invention) and there have been many examples of this throughout history - Guns. Germs and Steel is the best book on such ideas. (I'm always going on about that book.)

Rommel's 'Asparagus'
Some accounts state that the materials used for the cutters were 'Rommel's Asparagus'. When Rommel was assigned to the Atlantic Wall, he installed hundreds of metal poles in fields. These were to disrupt and crash the fabric-covered gliders that were to land there. There were in fact many types of (beach/ field/ anti tank/roadlock) obstacle for the engineers of the hedge-cutters to recycle and so I have tried not to be too specific.

Orientation
Starting the story at the map begged a few issues (covered later on in 'Cartography' too). I would start with the general map of the area. I felt I could exclude a global 'locator' as we called them in my old design team as I reckoned that knowing where France is should be like knowing that WWII was in the last century. (Is this presupposed knowledge - i suppose it is - but many of the readers really know their stuff/(were there!) so lets just go with it) How to then zoom in was trickier. I wanted to first use the long tiled-field element that explains how many fields the troops would need to cross. I then thought that that is not useful information until you knew how dangerous they could be and that info had to come first - at the bottom of the left page. So I continued a slow zoom - into an 'anyvillage' and then to the hedgerow itself.

Fairness
I was aware (being British) that it was not just the Americans who faced difficulty here. The British and Canadian troops also faced difficulties - but especially through street fighting. It is important to try to concentrate on one story at a time and so I stuck with the US tale of the hedge cutters.

Design Issues
Arrows
I have been trying to make the arrows blend into that which they indicate as much as possible. This is more possible by using the 'darken opacity' transparency on them. In this way they are less singular arrow-shaped agents and more part of the graphic. Anyone interested in Arrows in Information Graphics could do worse than read Edward Tufte's new book - Beautiful Evidence - its got a really good chapter on them. (Anyone thinking that this is abit too detailed about Information Graphics - that was your hint - this is not the site for you.)

Cartography
I am getting closer to deciding a house style for these maps. I am pretty happy with the colours - but I need to decide whether they will always be the same style. The commando knife graphic (incidentally the most searched-for on Google) features a map that doesn't need a lot of cartographic detail and begs the question of how much detail does one need for basic story telling as opposed to actual wayfinding.

The cutters
On the Sherman tank with the orange cutter, I don't suppose that any units painted their cutters bright orange - nor would it have been the thing to alert the dug-in Germans that a Sherman tank was coming into their field, but I think that colouring them so in this graphic succeeds in alerting us to what we need to know (Colour Leads The Way). (I chose the colours as they have a 'construction' look - an artistic license that I hope is OK.)

Not Using The Spread
Some designers feel, if given a double page spread, you should use the increased area to maximise your message through a device that occupies or exploits that area as a whole - rather than just in pieces. I looked at this issue of the graphic-vista in the Assault Rifle write up but here is a counter argument (to myself) - If the most important role for design is to support the information, and the information will have an optimal format (narrative, argument, breaking news etc) then the design needs to compliment that format. The design format chosen here aids narrative (the story of problem - then solution) through traditional reading from top left to bottom right - with words and pictures along the way. By getting people in at a natural entry point (top left) and hopefully keeping their interest throughout, you will impart the information in an appropriate way. Of course not all graphics are a narrative - the 'Which Tank was tops graphic was what we could call Guided Data.

Guided Data
Hmm - I think this is a separate post but it is something to do with the fact that augmenting a chart, should not be jazzy pictures (count the roller coasters next to the stock market charts over the next few months) but stories that highlight trends and facts behind the data. True, advanced graphics with many layers can develop from just making this clear to showing correlation, but a story helps too (that's why people like presenters talking next to charts on TV News.)