One's in the Eye

I mentioned architects and signs a few years ago on this blog, and it grew into a piece that's just appeared in Eye magazine. They've put some supporting pictures I provided on the Eye blog. The article is here, and the blog is here.





There's a nice profile of Robin Kinross in this issue. It's good to see his single-minded pursuit of quality in design writing and publishing properly celebrated.

Small print the movie?

Thanks to Beth Shepherd who sent this and told me about the wonderful Every Day Posters Every Day site, where it comes from.

Angry people blog

Nice blog covering a genre I hadn't thought of: Angry People In Local Newspapers.

I wonder if Stockphotos have these on tap. I'd like them to spice up document critiques.

This blog also has some nice links. If you enjoyed the recent mother/daughter in law correspondence in the UK press, you will also like Passive-aggressive notes

I have read and understood...

At the Simplification Centre we're looking at fresh ways to approach the small print - the contracts we sign when we install software, get a mobile phone, borrow money. I was speculating that if we sincerely want people to understand these things, wouldn't we apply best practice from textbooks - a genre where people genuinely have to and want to understand the content. In a textbook we expect summaries, explanations, definitions, diagrams... and even aims and objectives, and self-test questions. We expect legible type, plenty of white space, and pictures to relieve the tedium. A photo and short biog of the author on the back, too, of course.

Jenny then suggested going one further: if we are really sincere about communicating contract conditions, people should sit an exam before they can sign.

Of course the opposite could equally be true. Instead of sitting an exam at the end of their university course, students could simply sign a declaration: 'I have read and understood this course'. Thank you ma'am: here's your car keys/loan/degree certificate.

Explosive material: even more icons of doom

So I'm just posting these icons of doom, as usual, when Phil Gilbert sends me this one:

I wonder if the context helps? Barely...

Info design cartoons

It occurs to me that an incredible number of cartoons are information design jokes. Most of Roz Chast's output is like that (huge fan). And I had this nice Scott Garrett one from the Indie on Sunday on my notice board for years.

Unclear - just a typo away from oblivion

Discussing ways to simplify consumer contracts recently, the marketing director of a large firm remarked that his firm's contract contained various clauses that they never actually enforce because it would bad for their reputation. He thought they might as well just leave them out. When translated into plain English some contract terms might just seem too toxic to leave in.

It occurs to me that the process of simplification is also a kind of defusing or disarming. The Campaign for Unclear Disarmament, anyone? No, I thought not. That pun will go no further than this blog.

More icons of doom

Thanks to Collin McDougall for this last one.

Icons of doom

Polite notite

People have written 'polite notice' on signs for many years, hoping we'll mistake it for 'police notice' and pay more attention. But the notices themselves are rarely convincing. Which is why this one, seen near Paddington Station, is quite impressive. Using the Transport font, in the right shade of blue, and built like the real thing, it's the best I've seen.

Icon crazy

Andrew Belsey spotted this symbol. It was accompanied by some words, but have a go at interpreting it before clicking here for the answer.

You can't see them but they can see you

I always feel there must be a story behind every informal notice you see stuck up around a building.

Seen at the Royal College of Art.

Laver's law and typefaces

Someone just asked me what's with Cooper Black - nice typeface but mostly seen as the credits roll for Dad's Army.

I remembered some kind of law of fashion cycles, in which our view of a fashion changes as time passes. So just went on 'tinternet and found it is known as Laver's Law

James Laver was a fashion historian at the V&A, and this appears in a 1937 book Taste and fashion.

"The same costume will be:

Indecent: 10 years before its time
Shameless: 5 years before its time
Outré: 1 year before its time
Smart: now
Dowdy: 1 year after its time
Hideous: 10 years after its time
Ridiculous: 20 years after its time
Amusing: 30 years after its time
Quaint: 50 years after its time
Charming: 70 years after its time
Romantic: 100 years after its time
Beautiful: 150 years after its time"

This seems to have worked quite well for flared trousers which have ceased to seem quite so ridiculous, and I feel I can once more share our 1975 wedding photos (merely amusing now, heading towards quaint). And it won't be too long before photos of blokes with their trousers falling down can be used for blackmail purposes.

But I'm not so sure it works so precisely with typefaces. I think Cooper Black is ready for mainstream re-entry, but I'm not ready to dust off Kabel.

Nothing's really new

Martin Andrews puts on frequent displays from the ephemera collection at Reading University. A recent one was of old letterheads - the sort with a picture of the factory, and illustrations of key products. Some of them were so full of pictures that there was very little room for words.

Here's one from my own modest collection (of two). What strikes me about letters like this is how similar they are to modern marketing emails, with a central message surrounded by pictures. And the references to telegrams in the letter reminds us that fast business communications have been around for quite a while.

I bought this example from the wonderful Ken's in Newport Pagnell, when our company was based there. Not just a motorway service stop, NP was also home to Information Design Unit, and William Cowley's parchment works, one of the last left in England.

Typeface test

Do you prefer (a)

or (b)?

Accessible or not

This taped-over access button at Camden Arts Centre looks a little callous until you see it's at the top of a flight of steps. Good luck getting your wheelchair through that door.

My midnight train to Georgia

As I pack away my books, workers outside are putting the finishing touches to a gleaming new office block they’ve spent the last year or more building. As turf is rolled out, the mud and rubble becomes an impeccably striped green lawn, and today they are fitting the street lamps.

Symbolic, I wonder? Three years ago, the moment I moved into this office they started demolishing the buildings next door, a protracted process with delays while they dealt with asbestos, and one that involved a combination of precision disassembling and the grinding brute force of a huge machine that ate all the concrete and bricks and turned them into hardcore for the new building’s foundations. With a six month pause while the banking crisis delayed their progress, the noisy activity has continued for most of the three years. Working to the constant din of reversing dump trucks and fork lifts, generators, cranes and deliveries, the environment didn’t feel as friendly as the cheery memos the builders were careful to send, keeping us neighbours in touch with their progress.

Meanwhile, sitting in an almost unheated office (12 degrees some days, on the thermometers purloined from the kind biologists next door) reading memos from the university urging us to save energy, we realise that some things in universities, those communities of highly intelligent scholars working to create new knowledge for the common good, are not as they may seem.

Anyway, I’m leaving now, leaving behind the disassembling, dissembling and grinding down (I’m speaking of the building site next door, of course).

Yellow Pages shrinks further

The once mighty Yellow Pages is shrinking in the face of internet competition, and now they've literally shrunk the book itself. Ours arrived today and the print is so small I thought it was a contract needing my signature.

Odd thing is that the paper edition is really only useful for people without a PC, many of whom are elderly... who happen to be just that part of the population who struggle with tiny type.

One good thing is that most of the opticians seem to be on to this and have large print ads.

Instant coffee an oxymoron?

Seen in our office coffee room: 'Nescafé Café Parisien: L'experience des cafés français'.

On an unrelated note, who was it who said that when hearing a political speech, one should always ask oneself 'why is this lying liar lying to me?'.

Question 17: Que?

From the Scottish census website

 Well, I've got to question 17 OK.

In praise of Studio Vista, Ken Garland and the good old days

I'm not sure if there is anything around today that is quite like the Studio Vista series of design books published in the 60s. There weren't all that many design books to choose from then, but these were fairly affordable, accessibly written and stocked by our local bookshop - I bought several of them while still at school, and they did a lot to lure me into graphic design.

Here are the ones that survive on my bookshelf - I also remember having Norman Potter's What is a designer, and  John Lewis's Typography: basic principles.

Ken Garland's Graphics handbook was the one that had the most influence on me - it was too early for me to really get the more philosophical books such as Pye or Potter, but Ken's book provided an uncomplicated toolbox, covering everything from semiotics to international paper sizes in just 90-odd pages. And it does have a philosophy, demonstrated through its scope, its timeless layout, and a wonderful preface, which Ken printed in enormous type in the hope it would be read.

I mentioned the influence his book had on me recently to Ken (who I had the immense good fortune to be taught by), and I recalled the photo of him on the back. He pointed out that the book was written so long ago that the little girl he is holding here is now 50.
http://www.kengarland.co.uk
 

Murdoch's firewall. I don't mind paying but I want to be able to share

"A political community is properly bounded when congruence and symmetry prevail between the “governors” and the “governed” and when an imagined community of fate connects its envoys directly to a common political project. Or not.

I read that in a paper by Professor David Held, of the London School of Economics, and it may, just possibly, be the wisest observation on politics that I have yet come across. But it also might not be. I can’t be sure because I haven’t got the first clue what the professor is going on about.
...
It is a frustrating feature of much academic political science that reasonably simple points are made in an impossibly complicated way — presumably to make them sound more profound. Straightforward distinctions between people who imprison dissidents and others who think that this is not a very good idea disappear in a mass of verbiage. And everything sounds reasonable. Or not."

So wrote Daniel Finkelstein in a really perceptive column in The Times today entitled "The LSE scandal is intellectual, not financial".

Unfortunately if you follow this link, you won't be allowed in without a subscription, because it's behind Rupert Murdoch's firewall. I don't actually object to paying for news, and contributing to Daniel's salary - I have a subscription. But it's a massive pity not to be able to share gems like this column. So I've torn the article out and shared some of it here.

Marital status a la census

Gay marriage is called civil partnership in the UK, I believe as a compromise to respect religious sensitivities. But, as the 2011 census form shows, it seems we haven't yet evolved words for when it ends.

Whatever the status of the word 'marriage' can we not just stretch the meaning of the words 'divorced' and 'widowed', for goodness sake? Particularly 'widowed'.

Census form arrives - oh joy!

Got the census form - long, intrusive and slightly daft at times. Question 17 is bizarre - presumably there was a question that was deleted, but they couldn't face changing all the other question numbers.

Caps Lock jammed on?

Notice in our local shopping centre car park. I'm trying to imagine the stylesheets they used to design this:
Important stuff
Really important stuff
Vital safety stuff
Important vital stuff
Shouting

Ship graphics

Yesterday's papers carried a story about giant new container ships which have been ordered. Obviously an opportunity for a useful graphic. Well, a graphic, anyway, in the case of The Times.

A few questions: What's the colour coded cargo represent? Can these two larger ships really be more than twice the length of the other big ships shown in grey below? Is the 18,000 container ship really the same size as the 12,000 container ship (the figures supplied suggest they are almost exactly the same size, so how come the apparently smaller one appears to have as many containers on it)?

The Guardian made a better fist of it, although much less ambitious.

The only problem with this one is that the correct unit of account to impress about the size of ships is surely the football pitch (105m) not the London bus. It's got to be something that you think is very big, that the impressive object is much bigger than. Most ships are longer than a London bus.

The greater error, of course, would be to compare it with something much bigger - for example, this ship might be big, but it's nothing like the size of Wales (or Belgium, if you want to go metric). Odd thing is, I can't think of  a unit of measurement that comes between a football pitch and Wales. The Isle of Wight, possibly.

They know where you live

Universities are doing their best to raise funds from alumni and Reading Uni boast internally about their success in this.

Now I've seen them in action and they're formidable. They've tracked down my 91 year old mum to her retirement home in Cornwall. She did part-time art classes in 1938.

I'd thought they were using student helpers, but now I reckon it's Pinkertons.

Sansible choice

Perfect typeface choice for this shop. Thanks to Martin Evans who spotted this.

Surprise apple tarts

Readers of digital newspapers will have noticed that proof-reading's gone out of style along with paper. I love today's recipe in The Times iPad edition.

PS.  I wish I'd thought of the title of this post myself, but I've just changed it following Paul E's brilliant comment.

Dunces and Derrida

About to buy a book on graphic design and reading (I feel the author's identity needs protection) when I noticed this customer review on Amazon:

"In this book, a number of dunces show that they've heard of Derrida, who 'showed that truth is an illusion'. Gosh it's ghastly."

That's what I call deconstruction.

Plain English - does it translate?

The European Union is making a welcome effort to introduce plain language principles, and last year produced a plain language guide, How to write clearly. A recent newsletter 'Languages and translation' refers to the rise of not just English but 'bad English as the Commission’s lingua franca'. It asked a number of translators to reflect on how they adapted the guide to various different EU languages.

We know that the rules of plain English don't directly translate into other languages – for example, English has many expressions for which there are latin and anglo-saxon alternatives - the latter are seen as plainer ('get' instead of 'receive'), but the equivalent vocabulary choice is not an issue in other languages. And we can use noun clusters in a way that just doesn't work in French, so our sentences can often be shorter.

But I found myself wondering if some of the translators' comments were actually about real grammatical differences between languages, or whether they didn't hint at an earlier stage of plain language evolution in those cultures.

It was very noticeable that the recommendation, common in plain English, to use the active voice, met with resistance:

"A chapter on the use of the passive voice was modified as the use of the passive voice in Latvian is not always a bad choice."

"Hint 8 (‘Prefer active verbs to passive’) could well be valid for conversational Lithuanian, but not for legal texts. In fact, the passive often takes precedence over the active here, especially when there is an inanimate subject."

"The over-use of the passive voice may be more of a problem in English than in Portuguese, as the latter favours the impersonal active."

But Plain English also involves the introduction of a more conversational style into legal texts, and met with similar objections many years ago. The point about active sentences is that they specify the doer, and so someone has to take responsibility for an action. Passive sentences avoid commitment. I wonder if that's not the same in Latvian, Lithuanian and Portuguese.

And again:

"The most difficult bit to get around had to do with addressing the reader directly. The English guide suggested using the personal pronoun ‘you’ more often in documents — something which is certainly to be avoided in formal Portuguese. Direct address is acceptable in advertising or in direct information to the public, but in other areas it may be wiser to use impersonal constructions."

Plain English, too, is nearer to an advertising style than was once acceptable. Isn't plain Portuguese also bound to appear less formal than is traditional in official documents?

I'd love to be corrected by someone who knows what they're talking about.

Circles on maps

Last Friday I was at the excellent Design of Understanding conference at St Brides. David McCandless gave a very good presentation of the thinking and process behind his Information is Beautiful website and book.

A common technique used by David McC, and the various newspapers represented at the conference, is to vary the sizes of circles used to represent different quantities. At one point Mark Barratt asked the question on a lot of people's minds: hasn't it been established that circles are a pretty unreliable way to compare quantities? I'm not sure it would be fair to say he was brushed aside - perhaps the background to his question wasn't really understood.

Doubts about circles go all the way back to Willard Brinton's 1916 book Graphic methods for presenting facts. Perhaps further.

Brinton's explanation shows, first, the well-known difference between using diameter and area - diameter hugely exaggerates differences. However, he goes further and condemns even circles that compare areas, pointing out that they have the opposite effect - we tend to underestimate the area of the larger circle. His conclusion: 'Horizontal bars have all the advantages of circles with none of the disadvantages'.

In his 1956 PhD thesis, James Flannery proposed a correction formula, so that the perception of the difference would be correct, even if the actual area of the circles is not. Several other people researched the same issue and came up with similar findings to Flannery's (apparent value = actual value * 0.86).

Unfortunately for seekers after simple solutions, Hans-Joachim Meihofer then showed that individuals varied too much in their judgements for Flannery's formula to be reliable. However, he demonstrated that the whole problem could be solved by using stepped sizes of circle and providing a scale.

The story is well told in Michael Macdonald-Ross's 1977 review 'How numbers are shown'.

Unfortunately it is not quite as simple as that - Patricia Gilmartin went on to demonstrate how important context is when viewing circles of different sizes (demonstrated through the well-known Ebbinghaus illusion). The centre circles are the same size. Oh dear.

My personal view is quite relaxed - I see circles on maps as simply relative and I don't expect to derive actual data from them. I am happy to see them as approximate (tiny vs medium vs huge). However, I have great respect for those who see statistics as sacred, and yearn for integrity in presentation...  which brings us to Michael Blastland's excellent presentation at Design of Understanding. He rendered this whole discussion somewhat irrelevant by questioning the reliability of so much of the data used for apparently simple charts in newspapers. And he reminded us that statistics is as much about probability and uncertainty as about facts - a view enshrined in the title of Howard Wainer's latest book on quantitative graphics: Picturing the uncertain world.

Michael's Go Figure articles on the BBC website should be required reading for information designers.

• Brinton W.C. (1916) Graphic methods of presenting facts. New York: Engineering Magazine
• Flannery J (1971). The relative effectiveness of some common graduated point symbols in the presentation of quantitative data. Canadian Cartographer, 8(2), 96–109.
• Gilmartin, P. P. (1981). Influences of map context on circle perception. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 71(2), 253-258.
• Macdonald-Ross, M. (1977). How numbers are shown – a review of research on the presentation of quantitative data in texts. AV Communication Review, 25(4), 359-409.
• Meihoefer, H. J. (1969). The utility of the circle as an effective cartographic symbol. Canadian Cartographer, 6(2), 105-117.
• Wainer, H (2009). Picturing the uncertain world: how to understand, communicate, and control uncertainty through graphical display. Princeton University Press.