03 of 12

Beyond infographics

I was saddened  by the recent passing of Hans Rosling, the Swedish “Jedi master” of statistics* passed away recently.

* not my words, The Telegraph had this as a headline for an article about him: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/08/hans-rosling-jedi-master-statistics-dies-aged-68/

Bill Gates paid tribute to him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/829057938044039168?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

This was not because I am a fan of statistics – it has it’s place and it is important, but not something I am particularly fascinated by.

Here was someone who did not only grasp the statistics, but was emphatic with the people behind the numbers. He also understood how to enable the rest of us to comprehend those numbers in terms of “getting” the underlying causes.

Creating visuals, sometimes digitally, at other times as physical objects, he managed to engage his audiences and educate them at the same time entertain them.

How important graphic design can be when used to educate is easy to see. How can we not be inspired by this?

Here is a short example:

And here is a link to a longer talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

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02 of 12

Designing for X

As if it wasn’t difficult enough to design for a known target audience. How do you do about designing for everybody, literally?

Google and Microsoft have developed their own design languages (Material and Metro, respectively) and made great efforts to be understandable to people from any culture, anywhere in the world.

Apple has not until more recently gone through the same process – resulting in the “OS X Yosemite design language”. Interesting since Apple traditionally have been very particular about visual design. They have had design guidelines for hardware and apps etc., but not an overarching design system until recently – just to clarify.

Having clear information about the design principles required is one thing, making it easy for designers and developers to use them is quite another.

Here’s a brief look at two ways this can be done:

Material Design is a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences.

Google is very thorough and have dedicated an extensive website to explain the Material design language: https://material.io (where the above quote can be found by the way).

They are defining dynamic interfaces with interactive motion, provide guidelines, a component library, and an extensive set of icons (If you don’t like icons much, this is almost overwhelming…).

Though “flat design” is a popular meme right now, there is something much, much deeper going on here at Microsoft

 – Steve Clayton

Microsoft made the information about the Metro design language available in a less detailed manner, it is more of a conversational approach. Their story is at the Microsoft website as a blog post of sorts, written by Steve Clayton.

Font choices are also design decisions

Google’s mobile OS, Android use Roboto, a specially designed font, Chrome, their browser use Noto (this is also used for Android for languages not covered by Roboto).

Microsoft Windows use Segoe UI, which is part of a larger font family.

In the world of Linux, there is Ubuntu’s own font, called Ubuntu, which is used as a user interface font.

So why is any of this important?

Making an environment consistent helps the user to understand what they are doing, and in the case of OSs, enabling them to focus on being productive.

The same goes for graphic design, both for print and web publishing.