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Quote of the Week:

The official Recovery and Reinvestment Act project logo

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has a logo, which will appear on all projects funded by the Act:

It's nice, I suppose. One interesting thing I noticed is the upper left borders of the two stars that intersect with the blue background border (in the upper left quadrant of the logo) aren't there. These two stars look like they've opened up, blossomed, perhaps, into the white space of the circular inner border.

Another nit-picky thing: the "RECOVERY.ORG" typography is very small. If you're using it at the size you see on this screen, it's about 14 points in size (nice use of old standby Trade Gothic, BTW. Is there a subliminal message to be had there, in the use of a typeface whose name reflects commerce?). When this mark is used in smaller sizes, the type is going to become illegible. I could see this happening when the ARRA money is being used along with other funding for a large project, and promotional roadside signs, posters, and web banners have to fit a lot of logos into a small space (they become, in PR parlance, "bugs".)

The little reverse swiss cross that forms the center of the big gear in the lower right quadrant of the mark...it alludes to the health plan reform, perhaps, as being integral to the recovery?

[3/3/09 22:24] UPDATE: This emblem, along with one specific to transportation projects, was designed by MODE in Chicago. Um, if you don't know by now, they did the Obama "O". (I can't wait for a Denverite to be President: more branding work for us Queen City designers...).

Other comments? Post them below!

image via abc news

by the way: looks like the folks over at recovery.gov are using Numbers for their charting:

Labels: branding, bug, design, graphic design, illustration, information graphics, politics, typography, usability

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1.14.2009

The first official presidential portrait taken with a digital camera

The incoming President, Barack Obama, has many "firsts" under his belt. I won't go through the most significant ones here, but from a photography standpoint, I found this one to be a nice "first" addition from the Obama-Biden Transition Team's press release on the topic:

"Today we are releasing the new official portrait for President Barack Obama.

"It was taken by Pete Souza, the newly-announced official White House photographer.

"It is the first time that an official presidential portrait was taken with a digital camera."

(emphasis added)

Souza was President Regan's official White House Photographer, as well.


More on Pete Souza here [browser-resizing flashy site].

Labels: photography, politics

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12.29.2008

Leveraging the netizens to edit for you

Change.gov is making government even easier to get involved in. Not only are they providing webcasts of the president-elect, and videos and statements from key personnell, but they are also soliciting questions from everyone, and asking site visitors to rate others' questions. The ones with the most votes get answered in the new year.

Go check it out, and rate some questions yourself.

The tool uses Google Moderator to parse the data. Also worth checking out.

Labels: google, information graphics, interface, nonprofits, politics

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11.06.2008

Flickr and the President-Elect: Behind the scenes on Election Night

While professional photojournalists often get the most incredible shots, which discerning photo editors then cull through and present to us the most incisive of the bunch, what happens when there's no "professional" around to capture history?

This has often been the case throughout the last 169 years, ever since the birth of the photographic medium. And even more so since the masses popularized photography as a cultural phenomenon--ever since flexible film was developed by George Eastman in 1885 and sold by his company along with the soon-to-be ubiquitous camera, the Kodak Brownie (slogan: "you press the button, we do the rest"). Once everyone and their brother started running around with their little black boxes filled with rolled film, we started accumulate a record of the lives normal, interesting, boring, and even exceptional people.

Well, Flickr has been around for a long while now (it's probably a hundred years old in Internet Years), and it's the flexible film of the 21st century. "Isn't the digital camera a better applicant to the "new flexible film" moniker", you ask? Not really. Before photo-sharing sites like Flickr, I would say that while, yes, the digital camera allowed you to very easily take LOTS of images, that wasn't really any different than what you could do with flexible film-based cameras (although digital cameras made "processing" the images a lot cheaper).

No, Flickr is more of a game-changer than the digital camera. Why? Because it allowed people to easily share their images (even ones scanned in from "real" photos made with film). It also allowed the rest of us to find those photos we were interested in. Combined with some interesting search-and-show algorithms for presenting images with more "interestingness" to us, those abilities make Flickr a witness to the history, both sacred and profane, both amazing and mundane, that is being made around each of us, every day.

And now we get to the title of this post. While there have been some great photos of the presidential contenders this year, There's been one candidate that--very early on--got their own flickr account, and started documenting their journey to the White House: Barack Obama. The images that show up in Obama's flickrstream are (almost certainly) not taken by him, but by the people around him: campaign staff that follow him from town to town, local organizers who pass along shots of work being done in small towns and big cities, and perhaps a professional or near-professional photographer or two, as well (David Katz took these, and many more in the flickrstream...anyone know anything about him?).

This has given us a wonderful peek behind the curtain of a campaign's facade. A very closely-managed and controlled peek, of course--these shots were vetted at some level by the campaign, and shouldn't be considered to be objective (as if that term has any real meaning in photography). Despite that caveat, Obama's Flickr photos show him at times when no other cameras are around. Case in point was the scene in their hotel room at the Hilton in Chicago, on Election Night, as the networks called the race for Obama. The photos aren't always properly exposed, the framing isn't necessarily graceful, but they give the world a glimpse of the back room of history, as it's being made. We got some great images from that night, and because of Flickr, some nice insights into the more private moments, as well.

Labels: flickr, photography, politics

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11.04.2008

NY Times' Front Page county-by-county electoral results map

The New York Times is featuring county by county results on its front page results map this evening. This lets people see the results come in on a very detailed level of granularity. Nice information design, once again....It's a Flash-based map, and by the end of the election will show a finely-resolved picture of who people want to run their country for the next four years.

From Jim Roberts' notes on their coverage:

All of the coverage will be accessible from the homepage of nytimes.com. Starting at around 6 p.m. Eastern time, when polls close in a handful of states, we’ll be presenting you with two versions of the United States map: a statewide view that will allow you to track each state as it is called (or as each candidate builds up a lead), and a county-by-county view that will display the counties in which returns have begun to arrive. The counties will be shaded according to the candidate who is ahead.

The states on each map are clickable; that allows you to zoom in on a state and then by rolling your mouse over each county, you’ll get to see up-to-the-minute vote totals for each county as well as the percentage of precincts reporting. So for instance when the results start coming in from Florida, one of our favorite election-night states, you’ll be able to check out returns in Pinellas County or Palm Beach County or Pasco County, just by scooting your mouse over the zoomed-in map.

Yes, you can see this sort of information on television, but we let YOU decide which states and counties you want to explore.

And if you haven't gotten out to vote yet, what are you waiting for? GO VOTE!

Labels: information graphics, politics

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GO OUT THERE AND VOTE

image courtesy of Obey.

Labels: politics

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10.17.2008

Fun activity for this weekend? Early voting!

Usually my weekend activities at this time of year revolve around gardening, starting to design Notchcode's holiday card (and holiday cards for my clients. Clients: need a holiday card? It's probably time to get started!). But since it's an election year, and I live in Colorado, I'll be filling out my state's four page mail-in ballot.


Four pages? Yes sir! We've got all sorts of amendments, referenda, and county, district, state, and national candidates to vote on. It's Colorado's longest ballot in 96 years. I suspect I will not be alone in voting for the amendment which makes it harder to get amendment questions onto the ballot, since we are all pretty tired of having every little thing written into the state constitution, rather than being enacted as a law. Some may call me short-sighted, and unamerican. Whatever; I just want to take less time to actually fill in my ballot than I do filling out my tax returns.

I want to take this democracy-reated moment to remind you all about the AIGA's project to make ballots easier to understand, process, and be counted for everyone. I have written about it twice, here and here. check it out, and follow the links there to the site with the sample ballot designs. It's very cool, and if you are in a position to recommend changes to your local ballot's design, your fellow citizens would thank you if you helped to implement some of the changes shown here.

Labels: graphic design, information graphics, politics

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9.26.2008

Statler and Waldorf: Pundits

The NYT has an op-ed from those cranky box-seaters, Statler and Waldorf, regarding the election season. Fits my mood today, so I'm posting it.

Labels: humor, politics

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8.12.2008

Downing Street has a new address

...on the web, that is. The British Prime Minister's office just updated their site, and it looks nice. My guess is it's either Joomla or Drupal-based, too. Either one would be perfect for a large staff to update the PM's site with ease, while maintaining an easy-to-use interface.

The overall layout is definitely designed to get information out to the masses. It's not fancy, but does provide a navigable front door (if you will) for information relevant to Number Ten's audience. Visually, the palette is neutral, with a little slate blue to call attention to section headers and menus. I wish the site designer had been able to match the "10" from the iconic address a little more closely, especially in the main header, since it also includes the "10" graphic from the PM's front door. Something to shoot for later on, I guess.

From a content perspective, there's a lot of aggregation going on, which makes this site a vast improvement, say, over the White House's less interesting site (sorry Yanks, it's dull, without much to offer in terms of aggregation or interactivity): flickr, YouTube, and Twitter are all here. A secondary sidebar has some more static info...an interactive tour of the residence, a bio of Churchill, and a guide to the new site. The majority of the space is for press releases and news.

Labels: politics, web design

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7.29.2008

Politicos using social media: who gets it, who doesn't

A quick survey of two world powers shows me that the Brits know how to use social networking [twitter] [flickr] , and while the Yanks have twitter, it's pretty dang dry. Also, while he has an equally-passive Facebook page, W doesn't have a flickr page. WTF?

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Here's the Prime Minister's Twitter:

Content evaluation: lots of banter, and answering of questions from other twitterers. A

Design Crit: the use of a black background and the choice of a cropped photo showing the iconic "10" address numbers on the Prime Minister's door is very British. Understated and stylish. B+

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And the White House's:

Content evaluation: dry dry dry listings of press releases, and events. D

Design Crit: The pale blue background is weak. No read, white, and blue? No american flag? Soaring eagle? The image of the President being used is incongruous with the screen name "TheWhiteHouse"...is it a place (where the stream is reporting on not only the actionsof the President, but all of the Executive Branch), or is it a person (the President)? Demerits for the bad photoshopped-in background behind W's head, as well. Let's get consistent, people! D+

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For the comparison, here's Obama's twitterstream:

Content evaluation: this is somewhere in-between: it's mostly a marketing tool to raise awareness for the events on his campaign schedule. I haven't seen his twitterstream answer questions from others, although he does use it to drive readers to other social and interactive media, where they are (by self-selection) comfortable absorbing more information. I think the Obama camp could learn something from the PM in terms of talking to the people, though. B-


Design Crit: repeating the visual mark in the background and in the user icon...good, but perhaps a bit repetitive? And I know that Barack Obama is the brand, it wouldn't hurt to humanize the branding a bit with a photo of Barack's face for the icon. Let the logo work in the background image. B

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Stats of Twitter followers*:

• downingstreet: 3,504


• TheWhiteHouse: 569


• BarackObama: 51,402

hmmm, who is reaching out to, and connecting with, the online community?

*(and before I get mail about not including John McCain's stats here, believe me, I looked for him on Twitter. He's just not there.)

Labels: branding, politics, social networking

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6.05.2008

Where the Democratic Candidates got their votes: some variations on the NY Times graphic

Amanda Cox and Farhana Hossain at the New York Times put together a graphic showing where in the US Obama and Clinton got their votes during the grueling, historic five month primary season this year. It's (as always) a nice visual explanation (click on any of the images to enlarge them):


While this is an accurate representation of the votes each candidate got, I noticed that it reflected some more general trends, in terms of geography. Obama did well in a wide swath from Philadelphia, down the east coast, and then well into Texas, for example. Clinton had support through the New England/Allegheny/Appalachia/South-Central portion of the midwest, and on down into rural Texas.

In terms of looking at this in a more general geographic sense, the precise circles of vote tallies made these broader areas of influence more segmented. So, in a spare ten minutes I made a couple of variations on Cox and Hossain's map that (while admittedly far less accurate) show the more general voting geography:

This one takes the green and blue colors the Times has used throughout the campaign to display Obama and Clinton votes and gives them a higher degree of color contrast by placing them in red and blue. Already I think the broader geographic trends are more visible. But I wanted to smear the data a little more, so I did just that: a little gaussian blur, followed by some increase in contrast, then a filling of the selected areas with a flat color (note that my half-assed casual attempt results in some obvious inaccuracies in which candidate got votes in some of the smaller datasets....now that I've mentioned it, feel free not to pick at me for it):


Now, this is a very general graphic, compared with the original. In many ways it is inaccurate. But it also helps to give a general picture of the topography of the race. I think there is some value in this, and I am sure that with the precinct-by-precinct data available to both the politicos and the journalists that create visual representations of a campaign a more accurate and at the same time more general picture of such campaign results (or polls or projections) could be generated. I'd love to see them, alongside the more traditional visual information graphics that we have become accustomed to seeing at the Times.

Labels: information graphics, politics, visual information

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5.19.2008

Bad Legislation Alert for Creatives: the Orphan Works Act of 2008

Andy reminded me that there is some important stuff going on in DC this year, despite it being an election year.

There was some noise made earlier in the year about an orphan works bill that was supposedly making its way through Congress, and fortunately it turned out to be one uninformed blogger (Mark Simon) bloviating and stirring the pot. But now, his sky is falling cries are proving prescient. The Orphan Works Act of 2008 would make it hard, impractical, and nearly impossible for the average artist (or any generator of original content) to register and copyright their works, past and present. It would require mandatory registration of works in a privately-held registry, for a fee, and you would have to register all previously-created work in order to protect it from someone who might want to use it without permission or even attribution.

Current copyright law protects your work from the moment it is created, regardless of registration (although registration has some legal advantages, especially for published works). Previous attempts in 2006 at an orphan works bill died on the vine, thankfully, and we in the creative community should write our lawmakers and explain why the current proposed legislation is a really, really bad idea. I've quoted the full text of my letter to my congressperson, Ed Perlmutter, below. Feel free to use it as a template for your own letter. Remember, don't yell at your lawmakers; just tell them that this legislation is extremely boneheaded.But, you know, with better vocabulary than that.

Some other good references on this from the Graphic Artists' Guild and from the desk of Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, Illustrators.

My letter:

Attention: The Honorable Ed Perlmutter
United States House of Representatives
415 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Date May 7, 2008
Re: The Orphan Works legislation

Dear Representative Perlmutter,

My name is Alan Bucknam, and I am one of your constituents in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. After reading about the Orphan Works Act of 2008, I am angered by and worried about the current legislation that is being considered in Congress regarding copyright law.

This Orphan Works legislation, if passed, will severely impact my income and life as a photographer, graphic designer, and artist. Not only will it give license for others to legally steal and use my work for free, it will be virtually impossible for me to afford the time and money to register my creations in all of the potential new registries.

As current copyright law stands, any work created by anyone is protected under copyright from the moment of its creation. There is no need to register the work (although registration can sometimes prove beneficial in court cases where creation and authorship are at issue, the provenance of work has also been upheld for non-registered work). I create literally hundreds of new works a year, and my clients pay for the right to use those works--not for the right to own them; the copyright remains with me, and allows me to re-sell or re-purpose the work for other clients, if I desire. A requirement to register every work I create--every brand, every brochure design, every website interface, every photograph--would place an undue and unnecessary burden on me. I would have to either spend literally hours each month registering my creations, or hire someone to do it on my behalf. I would also end up spending possibly hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on registration fees. I would also have to register all my previous work to protect it under the proposed legislation.

I currently have over two thousand works created in just the last five years that would require registration--not to mention all work created before that date. Multiply my story by hundreds or thousands of people in your district, and you can see that this is not just an abstract issue about intellectual property; it's an issue that will negatively affect many of your constituents.

I strongly urge you to vote AGAINST the Orphan Works bill and protect my rights, my copyrights, to all that I have and will create.

Thank you for your consideration of this important matter.

Sincerely,

Alan Bucknam

professional member, AIGA
owner/principal
Notchcode Creative
3300 Ingalls Street
Wheat Ridge, Colorado 80033-7432
303.915.5459

Labels: copyright, politics

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3.25.2008

Yeah, Barack has a posse, and I'm on it.

Just in case you were wondering about my ability to win friends and influence people:

Labels: flickr, humor, photography, politics

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2.16.2008

More great street art, and another well-designed (unauthorized) campaign poster

Steven Heller has a nice roundup of unauthorized campaign posters from past years (mostly the late '60s and early '70s) over at the New York Times this morning, in response to the Shepard Fairey "Obama" poster sensation. While he has some nice examples in the piece, he glosses over the phenomenon of Obama street art that has cropped up in the last few months. All sorts of folks, not just graphic designers and poster gods, have been designing campaign posters, graffiti, and other forms of what we in the business call "outdoor display advertising" for the populist candidate of the moment, Barack Obama. You can see some great examples of the genre over at GoTellMama.org.

Here's another example of a great campaign poster design, thoroughly unauthorized, executed very well. It's by Ray Noland. It speaks not only to the fact that Obama is the change agent, it speaks to him being eager to be in there, making it happen. It also shows off the fact that he is an unreconstructed street basketball player from way back. All of Noland's and others' work was on view at the GoTellMama! Show in Chicago this past week. You can see samples of work featured in the show here. A cryptic message on the site mentions that they may be taking the show on the road as well, so stay tuned.

Labels: branding, design, graphic design, politics

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2.15.2008

Like Jenny Holzer, only about Barack Obama

See what Barack has done for you lately.
Nice use of that old standby typeface, Helvetica (which seems to be seeing a resurgence thanks to the epynomous documentaty film and other, less savory efforts of mass-produced graphic design).

barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com via kotte.

Labels: art, politics, typography

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2.11.2008

Easier voting through graphic design

A nod in this run up to the November elections towards the importance of good graphic design in everyday things. Like ballots, for example. We all remember the hanging chad debacle of the 2000 general election, right? As Alice Rawsthorn writes in her article appearing in the International Herald Tribune,

One glance at the [Palm Beach County] punch card explains why they did so: the layout is hopelessly confusing, as is the blizzard of text. Those ballots are such a (booby) prize example of lousy information design that it's a mystery how anyone managed to vote correctly.

Indeed.

Even before the 2000 election, the AIGA had begun an effort to make voting easier for voters and provide more accurate results at the same time. The crux of the problem lies in how to present a large amount of content in the small space of a ballot--be it paper or on-screen. AIGA Design for Democracy advisor, former AIGA board member and AIGA Chicago president Marcia Lausen wrote a book, Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design which outlines best practices for accurate, meaningful, and understandable graphic design of ballots.

The AIGA also created, with the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), Ballot and Polling Place Guidelines which can be immediately implemented for state and federal elections. By making ballots more easily understandable, good design best practices can help the will of the people be accurately and clearly heard.

Labels: aiga, design, graphic design, politics, visual information

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2.04.2008

What Party are Creatives Supporting for President?

The Huffington Post has a fundraising exploration tool that uses Google's API to visually map donations to political candidates, and it provided me with a whole evening of fun (which explains why it's a good thing I'm married and not out trying to pick up a future mate). After virtually stalking my neighbors to see who was giving to Mitt Romney and who was giving to Barack Obama, I noticed that I could search donations by occupation. I entered in a few occupations in the creative field: "graphic designer", "creative director", "web developer", and so on. It was very illuminating. More importantly, this query provided me with a nice little dataset to make infographics out of. And now you can enjoy them too. (Click on any graphic to enlarge to about 1280 pixels wide)



The first chart takes the raw amounts of cash donated to Democrat and Republican candidates for president, grouped first by party donated to, and segmented within those groups by occupation. You can see that creatives are donating overwhelmingly to the Democratic candidates over the Republicans. In raw dollar amounts, it's about two to one. And look at those photographers! Man, they (meaning, in part, me) must be getting paid way too much to be giving all that dough out (actually, it's due to the larger number of photographers that donate, relative to other occupations).



So, now we know that creatives seem to support Dems over the GOP. But that brought me to a finer point: if you are, say, an art director, are you more likely to give to a Democrat or to a Republican? Remember, the first chart simply shows the total amount given. Within each party's breakdown, you get a feel for total amounts given by production artists versus ad execs, for example, but remember, there might be just one or two P.A.'s giving money, and a whole lot of ad-men donating, skewing the relative data. That's what brings me to the next set of graphics:

The second and third graphics show the relative amounts given by each occupation to Democrats and Republicans. The numbers are standardized to the largest pool of donors (those profligate photographers)at a 1:1 ratio between Dem-donating shooters and GOP-loving imagemakers. Now we can use the data to estimate if you are more likely to give to Clinton or to McCain, if you are an illustrator:



The third graphic overlays the data blobs for each occupation's Democrat and Republican donors, to help visually compare relative giving preferences. Which do you think works better?


One analysis suggests that art directors and photographers tend to be the most split groups, with nearly equal likelihood that you would give cash to either party. It also shows that we need to pay illustrators and production artists a hell of a lot more money before they give some of it away to candidates (or they are just really smart and spend the cash on more important things, like beer and espresso).

One thing this proportional representation doesn't factor in are the total number of donors for republicans versus democrats. Obviously, if there was just one Republican donor for each occupation (and they gave a lot of money), the relative charts above wouldn't work. But in general terms, I think it's a nice representation (this is why I am an information presenter and not a pure statistician...if you can give me figures adjusted for total number of donors, send it to me and I'll make new graphics!)

So, that's my two cents before Super Tuesday. Now: no matter who you support, go and make your voice heard and GO VOTE!

Labels: design, illustration, information graphics, politics, visual information, whitespace

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