Information design

Information design is concerned with arranging and pre-senting information in ways that enable viewers to use it efficiently and with the greatest benefit. This discipline can be said to have begun in the 19th century with the develop-ment of diagrams and maps that present the relationship between two or more variables. These included John Snow’s map of London showing the locations of cholera outbreaks in the 1850s, and a striking 1861 diagram by Joseph Minard that related the geographical progress of Napoléon’s 1812 invasion of Russia with the diminishing size of the French forces. These early examples coincided with a time when industrial society was becoming increasingly complex and populous, and both government and business needed new ways to visualize statistics. Other products to which infor-mation design contributes became important in the fol-lowing century: traffic and transit signs, product warning labels, and product manuals, to name a few.

Some of the basic considerations for information design include:

•  effectiveness at presenting relevant information

•  selection and arrangement of information

•  balance of attractiveness and clarity

•  proper use of the medium (size, materials, etc.)

Of course the designer has additional constraints, such as the purpose of the design (advertising, product documenta-tion, report, etc.), policies of the client, any applicable regu-lations (such as for warning labels), and so on.

From Physical to Digital

Moving from the world of print to the Web brings new resources and challenges to the information designer. Web design has many advantages over print—powerful layout tools and perhaps templates, the availability of animation or other effects, the ability to adapt to different audiences, and, above all, interactivity. However, each of these fea-tures brings additional choices—not only font and text size, but background, use of images, whether to include anima-tion (such as Flash), and how to design clear and easy-to-use forms and other interactive features. Further, designs may have to adapt to a variety of platforms (large desktop screens, laptops, PDAs, and mobile devices) and provide for users who have visual impairments or other disabilities (for more, see Web page design). For information displays designed to provide “at a glance” summaries and alerts about problems, see digital dashboard.

Although these concerns may seem far afield from the classic principles of graphic design, they actually represent technological extensions of them. It is easy to get lost in the particulars of designing, for example, Web pages showing statistical charts, without having thought about whether the charts themselves show information clearly and accu-rately in the scales and proportions used.