Gender neutral icons

Classic Isotype charts are sometimes referred to as 'rows of little men'. But how could we instead show rows of little persons?

I love this gender neutral icon which Tesco are using in their supermarkets. Just by stretching the arms out a little, it allows people of any gender identity to see themselves in it - it could be wearing a dress (or have wider hips) or perhaps its arms are just positioned like this.

The Noun Project has various other attempts:

The one on the left by Dan Brunsdon is typical of solutions which just combine icons - not so much gender neutral as both-genders. 

 I quite like the right hand one by James Walker, with its suggestion of hips.

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...

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.

Celebrating Rupert's 90th

I have developed a minor obsession with the layout of the Rupert Bear annual, a favourite of my childhood. I've mentioned before the parallel layers that suit different readers (and I have written a short piece for Eye magazine to be published this month). Last year was the ninetieth anniversary of Rupert, and it's been marked by one or two publishing events.

The Life and Works of Alfred Bestall: Illustrator of Rupert Bear is the biography of the longest serving of Rupert's creators, by his god-daughter, Caroline Bott. His archives are going to the Bodleian in Oxford, who recently put some of the work on display. It is very much a biography of the man – very interesting, but Rupert is only part of the story, and little is revealed about the origin of the layout.

More informative about this is The Rupert Companion, by Ian Robinson, one of the last of Rupert's editors. This is a wonderful book, designed by Faye Dennehy in a generous format that allows the illustrations to breathe. It's very readable and takes us through the whole story from Rupert's originator, Mary Tourtel, to Bestall, and more recent editors and illustrators. I hadn't realised that it was the sale of the Daily Express, where the Rupert strip appeared, to Richard Desmond that finally did for Rupert in 2002, although old stories continued to be recycled.

The layout I've been celebrating dates from the Rupert Annual of 1936, and was the responsibility of the Daily Express's children's editor, Stanley Marshall. Mary Tourtel had written four lines of verse under each drawing, but Alfred Bestall found that rather challenging and moved the format of the daily strip to prose. This also meant he could develop better dialogue for the individual characters. But in the annuals Marshall included both prose and verse, now in rhyming couplets.

Wheelie bin numbers: why so big?

Wheelie bins in Reading are often painted with enormous numbers. If you apply the ratio of size to viewing distance normally used for designing signage systems, I reckon these numbers are big enough to use on an airport runway, not a plastic bin that you're standing next to.

Big numbers are probably the result of people grabbing the best tool available for writing a number on a dark plastic bin - a pot of white gloss and a 2 inch brush left over from painting their house.

But our local garden centre now sells wheelie bin numbers in vinyl. Bizarrely, these are also enormous. I think we've witnessed the birth of a genre - to count as wheelie bin numbers, they have to be huge.

More slippery characters

Thanks to Asbjørn Clemmensen for the guy on the left who appears to have had an accident while ice-fishing. In the middle, he seems to be posing by the beach, while on a recent visit to Ljubljana I learned what 'disco dancing' is in Slovenian.

Not an urban myth

A colour-related factoid from Steven Fry's QI programme this weekend, which apparently is not an urban myth: during the cultural revolution in China it was thought that red, as the colour of progress, should mean 'go' in traffic lights, and green should mean stop. But they didn't all get changed over, so...

Colour blindness simulator

As a graphic designer I've often wondered whether to confess that I usually fail the classic Ishihara test for colour blindness. Perhaps that's why I prefer to call myself a typographer or information designer (we mostly work in black and white).

People tend to assume that colour blindness, or colour vision deficiency, is an on-off thing - that you just see grey, or that all colour blind people have the condition to the same degree. Mine is fairly mild, I maintain – it reveals itself in poorly lit shops where I pick out grey clothes and see they are labelled green (no, not lime green, but perhaps a dark olive or almost grey kind of green). And I am slower at picking raspberries than other people – I see the red against the green leaves but they just don't sing out to me as they obviously do to others.

Around 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some degree of colour blindness, mostly red-green. It is apparently genetic and carried by women, not men (somewhat ironic then to hear mothers criticising their sons' choice of clothes).

I found these christmas cracker facts on a useful website called colorblindor, run by Daniel Flück. It has a lot of resources and links – I was especially gratified to find his online RGB Anomaloscope test which reports on your degree of colour blindness (Ishihara just says you are or are not). Although all online tests are accompanied by a health warning about monitor settings, it seemed to work for me.

One useful feature is this colour vision deficiency simulator. You can upload an image and see what it looks like to someone with various colour deficiencies.

Figure-ground

Sorry about the quality of this image taken quickly on the move. It's a rare example of figure-ground problem in action. Perhaps you got it straight away but it took a little while for me to see the image here. I can't think why in retrospect - but, of course, once you've recognised something it's almost impossible to erase your understanding. That's why we need to test icons - the designer knows what they mean, and can never see them fresh.

Monkey vs umbrella

What's going on here? Monkey (long arms + tail)?, umbrella?

Back to the next page

Filling in this form online, I wondered why I kept being sent to the previous page. Well, where would you click to move on?

Careful, dancers

See my other post on this...

Making Policy Public

Have a look at http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/, where the Centre for Urban Pedagogy publishes a regular series of foldout posters that explain public policy. They act as go-between to introduce campaigners to designers and the results are impressive. Here's one on predatory equity (businesses who buy up rent controlled buildings, then harrass tenants until they leave).


Top: folded out as a poster
Below: information spread

The hotel I didn't choose

Just back from a few days trying out my new boat on Ullswater. We stayed at a nice hotel, but not at the one in the picture. In reality, it is perfectly fine, and right next door to a place I could keep the boat. But I couldn't bring myself to book it. Great art, poor ad.

Top: The hotel
Below: The Munsters' house

More nice graffiti

Cara Gerard sent me this.

and a link to more Geeky Graffiti.

I curse thee, Trainline

I like The Trainline, a booking site for rail tickets. But every time I use them I get fooled by the 'Continue' button on the last screen. It takes you to a 'partner website' - ie, an advertiser who wants to sign you up to something.

I don't use The Trainline often enough to remember that this is a con... and it gets me every time.

I hope they're making a little money out of it as compensation for the loss of customer trust. This kind of functional impersonation is pretty close to phishing.

Patronising logo

Adult functional literacy is a big issue, and there is a very long tradition of trying not to patronise adults by giving them children's reading primers. The 'On the move' BBC series was a pioneer of this as long ago as the 1970s.

You can find adult literacy tests to practice online, but just look at where you find them:

Non ironic version

To be fair, here's a new version of the email I just posted, that arrived about an hour after the other one.

You can read about the new journal here: PJIM.

New journal on data visualisation

Just received this email about a new journal on information mapping and data visualisation. Ironic, eh?

Actually it looks like a very interesting journal and I plan to follow this up. But it's just as well Parsons is focusing on visual stuff, not verbal - how's this for a noun phrase: 'a one-of-a-kind Research, Development, and Professional Services facility leveraging Knowledge Visualization'.

The King Canute signage awards, 2009: entry 2

In case it's not obvious, on the left someone has written 'Pls don't urinate here'. On the right someone else has helpfully drawn a urinal on the wall (Eagle Court, Farringdon).