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Quote of the Week:

Passport Stamps for Fictional Countries

I'm working on a project for a client which has, as a component, stamps for fictional countries. It's a lot of fun, and is a great excuse to look through lots of countries' visa and customs stamps for inspiration. A lot of them are pretty boring (I'm looking at you, United States!), but some are quite fun. Here's an early version of one of the dozen or so I'm creating:

Labels: graphic design, illustration, information graphics

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3.04.2009

The Joys of the Roughen Filter

Need a delicate tracery of intersecting random strings? Get thee to illustrator, use the step and repeat tool, and play around with the Roughen filter:

Labels: illustration, patterns

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3.03.2009

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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2.25.2009

M.S. Corley redesigns Harry Potter books a la Penguin Series Books

I've never been a fan of the book jacket illustration on the american editions of the Harry Potter series books:

The British versions are better:

But M.S. Corley's conceptual covers are the best:

Corley redesigned the books to look like the classic Penguin book series of days gone by. And the graphic simplicity is perfect. Tells a story without being too busy. Check all of them out, and order a print of one, if you want, here.

Labels: book cover design, design, illustration, whitespace

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1.26.2009

The Year of the Ox: It's here!

For those of you who haven't seen the little change to the home page, check it out.

Labels: art, illustration

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12.19.2008

Santa's On His Way

Before everyone leaves town for the holidays (or as I call it, "the two weeks at the end of the year when I can't get anyone to return my calls from the office"), I wanted to wish you all a wonderful holiday season. I hope you've all been good little boys and girls, because Santa is on his way right now!

Labels: art, holiday, illustration

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12.15.2008

Take the edge off

...by laughing at others' pain. I bring you 30 Ways to Electrocute Yourself, a flickr photoset from bre pettis. This collection of well-drawn illustrations hails from pre-war Germany.

Labels: accident, advice, flickr, illustration

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12.08.2008

Great Graphic Design makes everything better

One thing I remind people about all the time: everything anyone has ever made has been designed by someone. Great graphic design makes products, companies, and ideas more accessible by more people. Bad graphic design just makes products, companies, and ideas more opaque.

What differentiates the good from the bad? Lots of things. Focus. Brand integration. Accessibility. Grokability.

Paying someone $150, or $400, to design a logo will almost always result in bad design. Does that mean the designer who made it is not a good designer? Not necessarily. What it does mean is they aren't taking the time to find out what the essence of that brand should be. The same thing goes for paying a similar amount to design a website. Or a brochure. Even if you think about that money in terms of an hourly rate, rather than the value the design has for you (which is really how you should look at it), what does $150 translate to, in hours? I'll tell you: very, very little.

Would you trust a lawyer to draft the articles of incorporation for your business for $50? Would you let a $400 doctor operate on your heart?

Labels: advertising, advice, aiga, b2b, b2c, branding, graphic design, illustration, information graphics, interface, licensing, logo, marketing, nonprofits, packaging, process, ROI, seo, typography, visual information, web design, work

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11.25.2008

Gröna Nyckerhålet = GOOD

The Swedes have a lot of things going for them: amazingly beautiful people, enlightened public policies, and--I am just assuming here--an IKEA on every corner. But as my old friend Jen Buley recently pointed out, that's not even the best thing about Sweden. the best thing about it is the Green key.

.The Green Key is a symbol you find on all sorts of food and household goods, and it basically means that a particular product has been produced in a way that is environmentally-, socially-, ethically-, and consumer-friendly is low-fat and/or high in fiber. It's a "green key".

As a graphic symbol, it's very simple: a traditional 19th-century keyhole knocked out of a black circle. Fits very easily on almost any space. And its visual density is great enough to set it apart from the visually gray blocks of text and bar codes that it will inevitably be placed near. Very nice example of good design for a good cause.

Labels: design, icon, illustration, information graphics

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8.25.2008

Travel Posters for Intra-solar system Tours

Steve Thomas in Minnesota has created some fanciful travel posters for many lovely tourist hot-spots of the future, right here in our own solar system. They borrow from the styles of travel posters from the '20s through the '50s, and are a lot of fun. Check them out, and buy one, if you like one.

Labels: advertising, graphic design, illustration

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4.16.2008

Watch the outliers: an information graphic

This is one of the twenty-something graphics I created for a book on Participatory Action Research, called (aptly enough) Participatory Action Research for Educational Leadership: Using Data-Driven Decision Making to Improve Schools, by E. Alana James, Margaret T. Milenkiewicz, and yours truly. The graphic pertains to outliers, and keying in on them when examining constituencies within a learning environment. From Chapter 11: Educational Leadership:

[this graphic] displays a school, showing both the diversity and clustering of activity within the main influences of the staff and student populations and the few instances where entirely different forces are at work. Leaders at all levels within complex environments such as this illustration continually need to evaluate the questions presented by individuals on the fringe

Speaking from personal experience, I can attest to this. From the time I became a teenager until I graduated from college, I was an outlier within my educational environment. Like a substantial minority of kids, I dressed differently, made different decisions on my educational focus (art! band! philosophy! eek!) and enjoyed being unpredictable enough--at least in the eyes of my peers--that I could fit in with anyone, without really being of any particular group (except for when I was). I never gave educators a headache, but I was an outlier in many ways, and there were enough of us that I am sure we had to be dealt with in a special way--even if it was just to give us a special activity or class to occupy us and keep us out of trouble and enrich us at the same time.

Outliers are more than just social groups. As the book states,

Outliers may also indicate the start of important trend. Imagine how strong the academic potential of a school the created a robust [English as a Second Language] department as immigration emerged in the neighborhood rather than waited until the challenge became overwhelming.

So the outlier becomes the hub of "normal" within a few years, and those who weren't paying attention missed the boat.

As to the diagram: I think it does a good job of showing the variety in a typical educational environment, along with the clustering-with-overlapping-and-connecting elements that are present in any catholic environment (bonus points to my readers who know the nonreligious meaning of "catholic", by the way :) In the book it's black and white, but I present it here as displayed in the book's precursor, which was a web-based professional development tool.

If I was developing this solely for the web today, I'd animate it using Flash, to show the change of outliers becoming the norm over time, as well as showing how people within the "norm" move around, how groups wax and wane in popularity and population, and in general showing how dynamic the educational environment really is.

Labels: alana, illustration, information graphics, PAR, visual information

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2.09.2008

Best. 404. EVAR.

A lot of other designers have talked about how kickass the Barack Obama branding is, especially regarding how their site pulls it all together. But in case you head on over there on a day where their servers aren't overwhelmed by donors and news-seekers, this is what their 404 page looks like:

"Thanks to your overwhelming support,
our servers are a bit overwhelmed right now...."

What's great about this is that for one thing, it's not just a generic 404 page (which any smart company will already have replaced with a custom one). For another, the language speaks to the essential brand identity of Obama, that is to say: "hey, we are the underdog candidate, right? We're happily surprised that our server is being hammered right now. Isn't it cool?"

That subtext, reinforced by the subtle silhouette of the masses of people above the text, makes this one of the best 404/error pages I've seen.

Labels: design, illustration, interface, web design

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2.08.2008

Door as Power Plant: Looks like a famous work of art to me!

Found this neat idea for a revolving door at Fluxxlab (via Gizmodo) that generates power from the people pushing it this morning. Nice design concept, and the graphics to show off the concept and process are lovely. But it does look a bit like the structure in one of my favorite pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Have a look:




and here is a wonderful deconstruction of Duchamp's schema for his work, by Andrew Stafford:



(here's a detail of the bottom panel of the original Duchamp work too, which you must go see if you are anywhere near the Philadelphia Museum of Art:)

Labels: art, duchamp, illustration, information graphics

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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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1.22.2008

Once again, the New York Times does Information Graphics Right

The folks over at the New York Times always seem to do visual displays of any kind of information the right way. From graphics showing deaths in Iraq to the US elections, their illustrators manage to pack a lot of information into a compact, understandable package. The latest case in point: Analyzing the January 5th Democratic presidential debate transcript.

The amount of words for each candidate, the moderator, and video clips are displayed as blocks in a chart. Run your mouse over the candidate's name, and their blocks are highlighted. It gives the reader a sense of the pacing of the exchanges between candidates, and allows them to see who talked the most on which topics. Run the mouse over a block, and the transcribed debate text appears in a box to the right.

You can read the entire debate this way, look at just the statements of one candidate, pick out the long passages of speech, or look into the snipes and jabs exchanged between the speakers. It's one more example of why the NYT is so good at conveying information to a broad audience.

Labels: illustration, interface, visual information

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7.03.2007

Happy Fourth

Happy Fourth of July, from the wonderful graphic designers of the Works Progress Administration:



Found on Shorpy, the lazy man's way to see the past.

Labels: design, holiday, illustration, wpa

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12.06.2006

To the Publisher!

My co-authors and I are about to send our baby off to the publisher. We did an inter-continental conference call (gotta love Skype) this morning (evening for them) and ironed out the stuff that needed to be completed. I spent most of this afternoon completing a few stray graphics, collecting everything into nice, tidy packages, and checking all the items off of my to-do list, one by one.

And now it's off to Alana and Margie for one last glance, then off to California to the publisher, where it will be copyedited, typeset, proofread, and then published. More info on the book as it comes closer to being a reality. In the meantime, here are a couple of the illustrations I contributed to the book.

Labels: alana, book, design, illustration, margie

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