Information Design: How To's and What For's

Time for another definition: information design. Simply put, it's about the flow of information from you to someone else, and how to structure that flow most efficiently.

Everyone has seen webpages, or heard lecturers, or read books, with really great ideas that they just can't get out properly. That's where information design comes in, to assist with layout, presentation, and structuring to turn useless data into meaningful information.

CityRail Timetable:

Cityrail Timetable for Macarthur to City Line. www.cityrail.info. Accessed 23.3.10.

A train timetable doesn't seem designed, does it? It's a pretty sensible way of structuring the information. But imagine if instead of a table, the numbers were all in a paragraph. No easy comparisons, no quick checks. Putting the times into a table makes the data legible, clean, and easily sorted. Not all information design is revolutionary, but it's still important.

Charting The Beatles:

Deal, M. Charting the Beatles - Authorship. http://www.flickr.com/photos/44927243@N05/4263875951/sizes/l/in/pool-1245660@N25/. Accessed 23.3.10.

Charting the Beatles is a project by designer Michael Deal, to quantify aspects of The Beatles, from record sales to album contributions to chord use, in easy to use graphics. In the thumbnail above (representing authorship), you can probably see a lot of yellow and blue - that's Paul McCartney and John Lennon respectively. Without having to go through the information yourself, you can make discoveries about the information's significance - data has become information, becoming wisdom.

America: Where We Live:

Lertola, J. America - Where We Live. For TIME Magazine, http://www.time.com/time/covers/20061030/where_we_live/. Accessed 23.3.10.

This image, created for Time Magazine, shows where the American population is located on the continent. Using taller peaks for larger portions, this illustration clearly transforms what would have started as a mass of statistics into a clear, understandable graphic that reveals some perhaps unexpected truths.

And that's the key to information design: turning data into information by sorting, visualising, or illustrating.