I did a freelance job once where the client gave me pretty much free reign. He told me to make an informational flyer for airport vendors and threw in some copy. I’m quite enthralled with the infographic trend so I designed this how-to sheet in the infographic style. I was pretty pleased with myself as I sent that pdf along with the cursory “If you have any changes, let me know.” Then I was pretty shocked when the client did in fact have some changes. He (obviously) thought it looked cool, but that it would be far too confusing for the target audience, who perhaps aren’t so up on design trends (and overall awesomeness). My elitism aside, I understood his point and redesigned the flyer in a simple, remedially easy way to understand.
When Donald Norman extensively explains how the Official Airlines Guide could be redesigned in umpteen ways, only to then conclude that for its purposes, it should remain just the way it is, it really resonated with me. I believe form follows function, but Norman made me think about how there are levels within function. When designing, I want to make things pretty automatically, but sometimes I have to pause before Illustrator’ing it up. The table works in the OAG because it communicates the most amount of information in the least amount of space, a criterion that was far more binding in the pre-internet era.
Both the target audience and the type of information need consideration, in order to properly design and represent information. That’s why the simple chart for when and how often prescriptions should be administered is brilliant in its simplicity and ease of use. The information is displayed experientially, rather than reflectively and as such, I’m confident in its ability to literally save lives.
The table concerning criminal activity of government informants in the Gotti case (in Escaping Flatland) uses a similar technique. The user has the same experience with the data in terms of search and computation. It lays out all the information in such an easy way that you determine patterns and understand the data in a much deeper and more fundamental way than as a narrative. There’s even an element of comic relief (at least for me) in recognizing exactly what Polisi is guilty of and the fact that “pistol whipping a priest” made it onto the chart, as if that is such normal behavior that we need to determine how many people have engaged in that activity.
As more and more information is readily available at our fingertips, it becomes even more imperative that that same information is organized and represented in a simple and function-driven manner. It is easy to get lost in the data if that data is not communicated properly.
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