Kelake

Edward Tufte has published a essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.”
“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations? ”
Link:Edward Tufte: Books – Essay: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

“If you are a designer or product planner, you probably create documents of some kind to capture your design decisions and solutions. Documentation is a crucial component of successful product planning and implementation, so it’s important that it communicates as effectively as possible. Good organization, complete information, and clear writing are, of course, key to the success of any design document, but there are some other, less-obvious techniques you can use to make your documents more readable and understandable.”

“I think that if space is deed the “final frontier” then we are all in big trouble-at least in so far as social and political theory go. Perhaps the contemporary shift to metaphors of space as modes of intelligibility is architecture’s triumph-the conquest of dense urban spaces and inhabited building by the principle of open space. It is not clear to me what ‘a new kind of space” Schutz has in mind, because, like architectural space, it seems uninhabited and uninhabitable. I want to ask – where are the people?”
Link: Shari Popen – The Power of Maps

5{ns are becoming increasingly visual and less textual. Converting every concept into an image is the challenge and, at the same time, the solution.
Presentations with visual support, typically running under PowerPoint, have become ubiquitous. All of us have been at some time in need of making one of them and they are, increasingly, a part of our daily work.”

“Poynter Online would like to showcase the efforts of visual journalists as they help readers find clarity.

More from “Understanding”…
Conversation is the most natural, effective, yet most complex mode of human connection. The goal of conversation is understanding between the participants. Successful visual communication design can be defined as frozen conversation much as wonderful architecture is referred to as frozen music.Understanding information is power.

Public information should be made public.
Public information refers to everything that explains our citizenship. Public means everything that we agree should be available to the body politic.
Making information public is somewhat less generic. This public means presenting, designing & structuring this information so that it is accessible, available, understandable & free.
Link: Richard Saul Wurmans – Understanding UNDERSTANDING

However unmoved, the news media cannot be seized as a scapegoat for the objectivity of information graphics proliferating the discipline of information design. Information graphics have traditionally upheld the role as a constructor of clarity in visual communication; where interpretation experiments explicitly create obstacles in the exchanges of highly sensitive, impermeable data.

“The essence of a graph is the clear communication of quantitative information. The ACCENT principles emphasize, or accent, six aspects which determine the effectiveness of a visual display for portraying data.”
Link:ACCENT Principles for the effectiveness of graphical display

As applied to iconic wayfinding representations for public facilities, Internet navigation, Interface Design, etc.
Link:Design of Signage System – Theory, Applications, and Resources

Information Design is a complicated field, integrating many different disciplines. That being said, at the most basic level, Information Design breaks down to simple common sense. Here are a few ways you can bring Information Design principles to your everyday life.
Read:How you can use Information Design

“Although there is a well developed practice and culture of movie sound, computer applications are a new challenge because of the types of information to be conveyed and the interactivity between the user and the sounds. This thesis develops an approach to the design of sounds to support information processing activities. The design approach is supported by a system of case-based and rule-based methods and tools. This hybrid system addresses key design issues in a flexible manner necessary for real world design practice. The approach, methods and tools are demonstrated in a series of scenarios that show how sounds can provide information that is difficult to obtain visually, and how they can provide extra affordances in the human-computer interface.”

Read: Auditory Information Design

Hopefully this article will prompt some discussion as there are some really interesting tidbits of information. I am almost tempted to quote the entire article in fear of them removing it at some later date. Anyway, kudos to IA slash for leading to this group of discussions.

Read:Information design on the web
Join the discussion on Information design at the AIGA.

Part of a series in the AIGA design forum this article is another one of those convenient lists of “do’s and don’t’s” for practicioners who don’t want or don’t have the time to dig deeper. Unfortunately I cannot link to the pdf download directly so you must go through the AIGA site.

Reviewing these basic dos and don