Tuesday, May 18, 2010

What Makes Good Information Design?

Finding the balance between graphic representation that is interesting, aswell as informative is always difficult, and sometimes time consuming. This image helps to clarify intent and suggests a criteria to use when developing information graphics. Sometimes the simplest of graphics can successfully demostrate a notion quicker and more accurately than spoken dialogue.

According to Information Is Beautiful:

The key components of a good infographic / data visualisation / piece of information design:

Information needs to be interesting (meaningful & relevant) and have integrity (accuracy, consistency).
Design needs to have form (beauty & structure) and function (it has to work and be easy to use).

In information design, it seems, if you have just two elements, you get something tolerable and cool:

i.e. integrity + form = eye candy
i.e. interestingness + function = experiment

But if you combine three elements without the fourth, things suddenly FAIL:

i.e. interesting subject, solid information, looks great, but is hard to use = useless.
i.e. amazing data, well designed, very easy to read but isn’t that interesting = boring.

No comments:

Post a Comment