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.

Dumped on the beach wet through

I've been going through a pile of old notes, rather alarmed at how little my thoughts have moved on from what was pre-occupying me fifteen or twenty years ago. One note, probably made during a conference presentation, caught my eye. I'm assuming it is something I had just heard someone say, rather than something I made up. It's about the concept of surfing the web, and it points out that surfing is extremely difficult and ends up with everyone being dumped on the beach wet through.

Return of the widow

I am addicted to my iPad, and I particularly enjoy reading newspapers and magazines again, free from annoying links and comments from crazy fellow-readers (otherwise known as Web 2.0). They are starting to restore page layout.

However, you have to get used quite a bit of careless editing - for some reason, more typos than the paper versions, headings that revert to plain type, references to pictures (right) when they are in fact somewhere else. And spectacular widows - particularly in The Times and The Economist (see above... well, OK, below).

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.

Venice of the North? Join the queue

Clicking some news links I somehow ended up with a story about the floods in Australia: 'Rocky the Venice of the North'. Overlooking the fact that Rockhampton would surely be the Venice of the South, they need to get in the queue. I've lost count of the cities I've visited that make that claim, but I've yet to see Venice reciprocate, and boast of being the Birmingham of the South. Or Stockholm. Or Amsterdam. Or Bruges.

15 minutes with Google I'll never get back, and here's a list of other contenders.

• Aalborg: Paris of the North
• Abidjan, Paris of West Africa
• Amsterdam: Venice of the North
• Asheville, North Carolina: Paris of the South
• Belfast: Athens of the North? (to be fair, this course at Queens University, Belfast, comes with a question mark)
• Bogotá: Athens of South America
• Boston: Athens of America
• Bourton-on-the-Water: Venice of the Cotswolds
• Buenos Aires: Paris of South America
• Coimbatore, Manchester of South India
• Edinburgh: Athens of the North
• Fort Lauderdale: Venice of America
• Freetown: Athens of West Africa
• Manchester: Venice of North
• Philadelphia: Athens of America.

So we all want to be Athens, Paris or Venice. Except that Coimbatore is keen to be the Manchester of South India. Given Manchester is the Venice of the North... well, you can see where this is heading.

There's a name for everything

User guide to jeans seen in Next.

Graduation 2010

Here are the 2010 MAs doing the hat thing. It was great seeing them back for graduation, and to hear that most have jobs.

In the Simplification Centre we've also spent the last two years piloting a Certificate of Higher Education in Information Design, and the first four students graduated this month. Here are two of them, Preneeta Mann and Anita Nair, with Jenny Waller (who developed the programme) and myself (first time I've worn the academic dressing gown).

60s coffee bar - in more ways than one

Passing this coffee bar in Liskeard, Cornwall, I couldn't help noticing not only that it was called the 60s coffee bar (think nostalgia, Merseybeat, Mary Quant,), but that most of the customers appeared to be in their 60s.And drinking coffee, obviously.

A personalised user guide

My mother is above the average age for mobile phone users, and has just got one for emergencies. A kind carer or possibly grandson has written out these personalised instructions. From the amendments it looks like they've been user-tested.

Affordances: the evidence mounts

Spotted in Milton Keynes shopping centre, another item for the affordances evidence file.

Is it the handle? Just take it off.
Or does it mean push, don't kick?

George III Ill

In the debate about seriffed versus sans serif type, we often mention the confusion between similar characters in sans serif typefaces: the lower case l, the number 1 and the capital I. Which explains why this line from the 1980s Radio 4 show Radio Active works (based on a spoof incompetent local radio station)

"She's seriously one hundred and eleven. (Pause). She's seriously ill."

Rounded corner boxes - I forgive you

When desk-top publishing first came in (remember that term?) it was easy to draw boxes with rounded corners, something that had previously been very difficult to achieve with Rotring pens, CS10 board and french curves (ask a designer over 40 to translate).

Because they were so hard to do, they weren't in the professionals' repertoire, and therefore a sign of an amateur at work.

In this guide to design for DTP commissioned by Monotype in 1991, rounded corner boxes are a feature of this amateur-hour how-not-to example.

I've changed my mind now, although I'm still not keen on long line lengths, floaty headings in upper case, and needless naff shadows.

It was a dark and stormy night

My last post ended with a quotation from Lord Lytton. Like me, you're probably thinking 'who he?'.

Dictionaries of quotations often drop in names,  assuming you know who they are. Now, of course, we have Wikipedia, and can find out in seconds (although don't tell my university colleagues who affect not to use it, at least when students are around).

If you're interested you could look him up yourself (he was a Victorian novelist and politician). But I thought I'd share one thing I learned there.

"Bulwer-Lytton's name lives on in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in which contestants think up terrible openings for imaginary novels, inspired by the first seven words of his novel Paul_Clifford:

'It was a dark and stormy night'".

From Heap to Skeleton

Going through some of my late father's books, I found a slim textbook, 'On the writing of English' by George Townsend Warner. It is undated, but published by Blackie & Son after his death in 1916. He was a renowned history teacher at Harrow School, and was the father of Sylvia Townsend Warner, the novelist.

It's a masterpiece of simple explanation - aimed at schoolchildren, it explains how to organise your ideas and write good essays.

His technique is to start by writing down all your thoughts: 'write them all down just as they come'.

This is your Heap, which you have to sort into categories that become a Skeleton. Today we might suggest a brainstorming, followed by a card sort to develop your organising principles, and then your  outline.

For abstract concepts he proposes another familiar technique: 'Try this. Say to yourself: What? Where? When? How? Why? and take a piece of paper.' I wonder if he was the first to come up with this formulation.

And he demonstrates how this works for three different essay topics. Looks like a template to me.

He moves on to talk engagingly about style, and rhetoric. His own style has something of a Mr Chips twinkle in its eye. His 'two great merits' are:
'1. To have something to say.
2. To say it neatly.'

And a word for academics: 'Another product of the cowardly mind is the desire to qualify'.

Which all reminds me of something I once found in a dictionary of quotations, ascribed to Lord Lytton:
'Do you want to get at new ideas? Read old books.
Do you want to get at old ideas? Read new books.'

Editors vs designers

Eye magazine's blog features this nice infographic that they in turn credit to Andrew Losowsky of Stack America.

Proof-reading and diminishing returns

When I worked at the Open University many years ago I remember hearing of a statistics textbook that was published with numerous errors, throwing students into panic as sums did not work. When the second edition was published errors continued to be found, and also in the third. However, the canny boffins turned the situation to their advantage by showing that the diminishing number of errors still found in each edition followed a neat curve. They challenged students to use that data to calculate how many errors might be predicted to be still present in edition four, five and six.

I was reminded of this by a recent post on Paul Luna's blog which includes a nice non-apology for numerous errors by a seventeenth century printer (the point being that the book took so long to print that facts that had been true when a particular page was printed, were no longer true when the book actually went on sale).

Dirty Work or Daily Mail?

I've been reading Rob Hillier's interesting PhD thesis on typeface design for people with dyslexia. A dyslexic person himself, he kept a diary of misreadings that he made between 2002 and 2005. He doesn't say if this is the entire collection, or edited highlights. I reproduce it here in the deadpan manner known to readers of Harper's Magazine:

“Special Events” misread as “Special Effects” (5th August 2002)
“CLASS WAR” misread as “GLASS WAR” (7th August 2002)
“Amnesiac” misread as “Asthmatic” (11th August 2002)
“Village of Parkside” misread as “Village of Paradise” (16th August 2002)
“MAR” misread as “WAR” (18th August 2002)
“Boating” misread as “Botanic” (18th August 2002)
“Felt-tip pens” misread as “penis” (28th August 2002)
“deaf signers” misread as “deaf singers” (26th October 2002)
“Win an incredible boarding holiday” misread as “Win an incredible boring holiday” (5th November 2002)
“Emily Bearn” misread as “Emily Beam” (24th November 2002)
Scudamore bullish over TV rights” misread as “Scudamore bull shit over TV rights” (26th November 2002)
“Bug Buster” misread as “Bag Burster” (22nd January 2003)
“Fiat father dies” misread as “Flat father dies” (25th January 2003)
“The Liberty” misread as “The Library” (24th February 2003)
“Phil Spencer” misread as “Phil Spector” (25th February 2003)
“WILLARD BEOPPLE” misread as “WILLARD PEOPLE” (15th March 2003)
“SHADY LITES” misread as “LADY SHITES” (9th April 2003)
“Handy Andy” misread as “Hardy Andy” (18th June 2003)
“Catalonia bans children from bullfights” misread as “Cantona bans children from bullfights” (27th June 2003)
“Split trust mis-selling probe is extended” misread as “Split trust mis-spelling probe is extended” (18th July 2003)
“SUPPORTING ACTS” misread as “SPORTING ACTS” (18th August 2003)
“Norwich Bravery Awards” misread as “Norwich Brewery Awards” (26th August 2003)
“HERO OF THE NORTH” misread as “NERD OF THE NORTH” (3rd September 2003)
“Sasakawa” misread as “Swastika” (19th September 2003)
“FACULTIES” misread as “F.A. CUP TIES” (13th September 2003)
“Mobiles ‘make you senile’” misread as “Mobiles ‘make you smile’” (14th September 2003)
“genteel London” misread as “rented London” (7th October 2003)
“Friea” misread as “Frida” (11th February 2004)
“How fair do you consider the unit assessment?” misread as “How far do you consider the unit assessment?” (11th March 2004)
“Travelling Around” misread as “Travelling Abroad” (19th March 2004)
“Dirty Work” misread as “Daily Mail” (19th March 2004)
“cocaine” misread as “codine” (20th March 2004)
“Spring city breaks” misread as “Sporting City breaks” (22nd March 2004)
“BBC will wreck quality title” misread as “BBC will wreck quality of life” (29th March 2004)
“resentful” misread as “restful” (31st March 2004)
“green” misread as “queen” (2nd April 2004)
“READJUSTMENT” misread as “READ JUSTMENT” (16th June 2004)
“‘new sister product’” misread as “‘new sinister product’” (20th July 2004)
“Heath art auction” misread as “Health art auction” (9th August 2004)
“Finding Mick Jagger” misread as “Featuring Mick Jagger” (20th August 2004)
“the less elegant” misread as “the less legal” (15th September 2004)
“CLONEX ROOTING HORMONE” misread as “CLONEX ROTTING COMPOST” (29th September 2004)
“tipster” misread as “lipster” (10th January 2005)
“Pakistani” misread as “Parkinson” (5th March 2005)
“The Art of Learning” misread as “The Art of Lettering” (14th March 2005)
“soft” misread as “80 ft” (21st March 2005)
“During the war” misread as “Doing the War” (28th May 2005)
“Windsor Chase” misread as “Windsor Cheese” (31st May 2005)
“Beaulieu Jazz Festival” misread as “Blackpool Jazz Festival” (19th June 2005)
“Buckfast” misread as “Breakfast” (20th June 2005)
“patients” misread as “parents” (25th June 2005)
“Carluccio’s hampers” misread as “Cappuchino hamper” (26th June 2005)
“Macmillan Cancer charity” misread as “Manchester Cemetery” (12th July 2005)
“dormant” misread as “dormouse” (21st July 2005).

Sans everything

I've been writing some notes on the choice between seriffed and sans serif type. Or should that be sanserif type, one colleague asked?

On checking a few dictionaries within two minutes radius of my desk, there are votes for both:

Sanserif
Oxford English Dictionary, 1933 (sans serif not given as an alternative)
Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 (sans serif given as alternative)
Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, 1952
Collins Online Scrabble Checker allows it

Sans serif
Pitman's Dictionary of Advertising & Printing, 1930
Longmans Dictionary of Contemporary English (online 2010)
Merriam-Webster (online 2010)

Seeking refuge in usage statistics, the British National Corpus has few mentions of either, with the vote tipped toward sans serif (14, with sanserif clocking up 8, but no mention of sans-serif). The Corpus of Contemporary American English has just 32 mentions of sans serif, with no mentions of sanserif, and 15 of sans-serif.

I'm concluding from this brief escape from my to-do list that: sanserif, sans serif and sans-serif are all valid usages; that sanserif is British, and not found in the USA.

The OED also has a variant 'surryph' which I take to be the New Zealand usage.

And finally, older readers will recall the famous Guardian supplement on the Republic of San Serriffe, published on 1 April 1977.

News just in: Quavers now one calory more

Judy Delin's eagle eye spotted this odd couple in the uni cafeteria the other day. The sell-by dates are different, showing that the higher number is the newer.

I know it's a stretch, but could we think it ironic that this supposedly low calory snack now carries a picture of the bingo ball traditionally known as 'two fat ladies'.

Not very politically correct, that term, as the Daily Mail (who else?) pointed out in one of their regular 'PC gone mad' stories last year.

"A council which has banned the bingo phrases ‘two fat ladies’ and ‘legs eleven’ in case players are offended and take legal action was criticised for being politically correct yesterday.

Sudbury Town Council in Suffolk fears it could be sued by overweight players or women who find the terms sexist.

It has advised bingo caller John Sayers, 75, to revert to using the number ‘88’ instead of ‘two fat ladies’ and 11 for ‘legs eleven’."

Affordances evidence file

Exhibit A: a toilet door in a government office.

Exhibit B: Can't help feeling there's a story behind this one.

Exhibit C: this Lufthansa check-in machine had two of us foxed for a while. The problem is that the Reservation Code is a list of numbers, but there are no number keys shown. It turned out that the number keys appear once you place the cursor in the right box. But we didn't get that far before bothering the airline helper.

Olympic security

In case you thought I'd lost interest in inept security questions (see here, here and here) I've just registered on the London Olympics ticket website.

Braving the shameful logo that I still can't get used to, I'm confronted by this choice of security questions:

Unfortunately at the age of fifty something, 'best friend' isn't a concept I think about much. I don't have a favourite sportsperson or a favourite food for that matter... at least not one that I could reliably remember two years later.

And what about all those poor sods who put Wayne Rooney down as their favourite sportsperson? Is there a way to change your mind?

I hope this isn't the entire Olympic security effort. Anyone who puts Osama bin Laden down as their best friend just won't get a ticket. That should do it.

Cleanliness 2010

Clarity 2010 was held at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, a fantastic facility with beautiful spacious modern architecture. The loo doors attracted a certain amount of comment - the inset handles were typical of sliding doors, and the Portugese word Puxe made you want to push. Puxe means 'pull' however, which wasn't all that easy.

Once inside you were rewarded with this very thorough 12-stage model of the hand-washing process.

Clarity 2010

Went to Clarity 2010 in Lisbon the week before last. Very stimulating, and met up with a lot of old friends. Three things stood out for me.

• Plain language is happening in more and more countries, and is taken seriously enough for governments to take action. For example, the Portugese government used the conference to announce a new initiative, and while we there President Obama was signing the new Plain Writing Act in the USA.
• While much discussion of plain language hasn't changed in thirty years (short sentences, common words, active voice), there were frequent mentions of information design, and several sessions looked at visualisations that clarify contract law.
• Many of the meetings were visualised by Susanne Hoogwater of Legal Sketchpad - she is one of a growing number of people who make a living from recording meetings using visualisation. She introduced me to a new book, Visual Meetings by David Sibbet. Worth a look.  And there is an interesting link on her website to the use of visualisation in conflict negotiations: http://peacemapping.com/. The physical mapping of different views makes it less easy to ignore what the other side is saying, and reassures participants that their view has been recorded. Not that any fights broke out among the speakers.

You have been warned

This summer one of our students chose the Highway Code as her dissertation topic. It has evolved since its introduction in the early thirties, but is recognisably the same publication. This reminded me of a book we had in our house as we were growing up. A take-off of the Highway Code, You have been warned: a complete guide to the road was in print from 1935 well into the 1950s. It's by the cartoonist Fougasse and the writer Donald McCullough and I still enjoy it. Here are some favourite pages.

It's a sign

Seen by Martin Evans. You don't just die of boredom, it seems.

Dona Wong on information graphics

Dona Wong's Wall Street Journal guide to information graphics is a great desktop guide to the design of graphs, charts and tables. She goes through all the basics, and demonstrates them using a simple graphic syntax that is undistracted by cool examples or the work of famous designers. Once you get used to her at-first-cryptic way of distinguishing bad practice (down arrow) from good (up arrow), it works brilliantly. This wasn't planned as a full review, but to note her thoroughgoing approach to information design and simplification. I loved her diagrammatic acknowledgement of the people who helped.

Dona Wong (2010) The Wall Street Journal guide to information graphics: the dos and don'ts of presenting data, facts and figures. New York/London: Norton & Co.

Clearing up crime

From a leaflet through our door on neighbourhood policing.

 I'm glad they cleared that up.

Plain Words in plain English

Sir Ernest Gowers is rightly acclaimed for his handbook on clear English, The Complete Plain Words. Published in 1948 it has never gone out of print.

It was aimed at civil servants communicating with the public, and in the first edition he writes "The purpose of this book is to help officials in their use of written English. To some of them this may seem a work of supererogation, calculated only to place an unnecessary new burden on a body of people already overburdened."

That's right - supererogation. I had to look it up too (it means 'spending over and above, beyond the call of duty'). And I had take a couple of run-ups before being able to say it out loud (think super + erogation).

A civil servant in 1948 would no doubt know this word, and therefore Gowers's sense of audience was impeccable. But these days we would tend to write about plain English in plainer English.

So I've had a go at translating a key section of Plain Words into plain English:

The original reads:

"A new technique is being developed for those pamphlets and leaflets that are necessary to explain the law to the man in the street in such matters as P.A.Y.E. and National Insurance. Its guiding principles are to use the simplest language and avoid technical terms, to employ the second person freely, not to try to give all the details of the law relevant to the subject, but to be content with stating the essentials, to explain, if these are stated in the writer's words and not the words of the Act, that they are an approximation only, to tell the reader where he can find fuller information and further advice, and always to make sure that he knows what are his rights of appeal."

Proof, perhaps, that a 92 word sentence can be reasonably easy to read if it is simply a list separated by commas. Here's my version:

"How to explain things like P.A.Y.E. and National Insurance :

• Use simple language and avoid technical terms
• Use ‘you’ as much as you can
• Don’t try to give all the details, but just give the basics
• Say where people can find fuller information and further advice
• Always make sure people know their rights of appeal."

We haven't really improved on that advice in 60 years. To try would be supererogation, 'nuff said.

Differences of opinion

I enjoy public debate - a couple of examples recently seen.

Strange

 

Seen recently in Hyde Park. No, I don't get it either.

Comic Sans or calligraphy?

My 95-year old Dad died recently and I had the task of designing the order of service for his funeral. Looking for a model to follow, I stumbled across several design-it-yourself websites. I enjoyed the sense of fun in the wide choice of colour options, and the choice of fonts, from the Cooperative Funeral Service.

I suspect Dad might well have gone for the Comic Sans or Arial, for its legibility.

Instead, I commissioned some calligraphy from Dublin calligrapher Gareth Colgan, an ex-Reading student. You can see more of his work on his website: http://www.garethcolgan.com

Soft drinks only

Sitting in the wonderful Vinoteca restaurant in St John Street, the other day (favourite place, next to where I used to work), I found myself looking at the other eating places across the street. Sandwiched between a pizza place and another pizza place (it's all about context...) was what appears to be the St Clements Dental Cafe. Intriguing... lots of calcium rich foods, nothing with sugar, definitely no toffee? Perhaps the food is like those cat biscuits they claim have ingredients that clean your cat's teeth.
You've guessed by now that the missing letter was in fact an 'r'.

Singular pants

I remember reading somewhere that the word 'pea' is a comparatively recent introduction. We used to call it a 'pease'. Now Marks and Spencer, and presumably other shops, seem to be doing the same for the word 'shorts' and 'pants'. You can now buy a 'short' and a 'pant'. I don't think you can buy a trouser yet, though.

As this swing ticket says: 'This lightweight trekking pant is made from...'. But it goes on: '...so they work in any terrain'. Obviously still a work in progress, this transition.

Odd thing is, on the website it/they is/are called trousers.

Before and after: it had to happen

I suppose if I hung around long enough in this business it was bound to happen - one of our designs appearing in a case study as the bad old 'before' in contrast to the shiny new 'after'.

In this case I couldn't help noticing our T-Mobile bill design as the 'before' to the new design developed by Boag Associates and Tullo Marshall Warren, illustrated in Borries Schwesinger's The Form Book. While not wanting to take anything away from the new design, I thought it might be worth looking at why designs become obsolete and need revisiting.

 

The bill we developed started as the One2One bill, developed by Karen Moate and Abi Searle-Jones (forgive me, other colleagues, if I have mis-remembered). It was pretty revolutionary in its day - colourfully branded, and designed to work both on paper and on screen. The key information is in the top half of the page, to allow for on-screen viewing as a PDF, and information on other pages is flagged on tabs at the top of the page - designed to become clickable on screen, and to act as an iconic access device on paper. To achieve this top half focus, we moved the postal address into the bottom third, where it was folded to appear in the envelope window, either on its own, or incorporated into the payment slip for people who paid by cheque.

A key constraint of this design was that it had to be implemented in the Flexible Bill Formatter application that is integral to the Amdocs billing platform. Amdocs dominates mobile phone billing and although at this time (the project started in 1998, I think) their formatter was very primitive compared with dedicated systems such as Doc 1, we had to use it... and were surprised to find that it could not cope with double column layouts. That's why in our design the customer information block is to the right and below the main billing information – Amdocs could not get it to sit in the white space above.

The new One2One bill was developed with live-data testing and real customers – this meant formatting around 20 real bills, with all their itemised numbers, and mailing them, followed by interviews. Reactions are far more authentic when presented with your own data rather than a scenario. All the usual achievements were noted after launch: fewer enquiries, higher satisfaction. And to crown it all, we won an award, presented at a bizarre but enjoyable dinner in Cannes. Here's a picture of our client Michael Soter receiving the award from Joan Collins. You never knew the world of billing was so glamorous, did you?

When T-Mobile acquired One2One they asked us to adapt the bill to the new brand, with the result below left. The new brand guidelines no longer allowed the tinted background that previously had highlighted the total on a white panel. But note that this is different in two key respects from the 'before' that appears in the case study (below right). In our version the customer information is anchored by the vertical line, that in the case study 'before' floats below it. And in our version, there is a prominent contact phone number at the top right, missing in the case study example (and criticised for being missing there).




The lesson from this – information design works in a shifting environment, where products change brands change, and most importantly people change. Memories fade, and designs aren't always maintained.

When we became fully integrated into Enterprise IG, following our own acquisition, we had to stop working for T-Mobile as Vodafone was a major client of the group. This was regrettable, as we had by then been asked to develop radical new designs for the bill, which, it was obvious to everyone, was no longer fit to cope with the new products and tariffs being offered by that time (2004). Here is one of the more exploratory designs we developed, never produced (designer: Richard Bland).

Borries Schwesinger's The Form Book

I've just been reviewing Borries Schwesinger's The Form Book for IDJ. I'm a fan. It's an engaging book that manages to combine a sense of the history and social role of forms, with a primer in basic typography,  a genre analysis identifying the essential features of different kinds of form, and a portfolio section of interesting forms from information designers around the world - some more exemplary than others.

Formulare Gestalten, the original German edition has been out for a few years, and this new version, with a more international set of illustrations is set to sit alongside Robert Barnett's work as essential reading for forms designers.

My only criticism (apart from carping minor ones that would only draw attention away from Borries' achievement) is that it has come rather late in the day – just as paper forms are starting to seem rather irrelevant and unnecessarily complex when compared with their personalised, carefully-paced, take-it-easy digital cousins.

The Form Book is published by Thames & Hudson, 2010.