informationists

(before)


(after)

EDWARD TUFTE
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Tufte studied statistics at Stanford, got his doctorate in political science at Yale, and had a public-policy professorship at Princeton. And his long roster of impressive accomplishments is not for nothing. Tufte is a statistician that has practically perfected the art of displaying information graphics with clear, data-rich graphics. He has written numerous books teaching and explaining the discipline of visually making data much more meaningful than statistics and numbers. One mantra, almost seemingly oxymoronic: To clarify, add detail. He encourages designers to make use of the higher and higher resolutions possible in print and digital, and readers to not feel rushed in working through a graphic's meaning.

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NIGEL HOLMES
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Holmes is a British graphic designer, graduated from the Royal College of Art, that especially specializes in information graphics and illustrations. His work is a lot more playful and colorful than Tufte's, but in this way more easily accessible and simpler. He also approaches the field of motion graphics and successfully makes comparisons clear for the viewer to understand.

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RICHARD SAUL WURMAN
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Wurman is an American architect and graphic designer that also specializes in making information clear. In 1984 he founded the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Conference, which meets annually and has lectures addressing science, arts, design, politics, culture, business, global issues, technology, and entertainment. He believes that we are inundated daily with information yet have few reliable methods of organizing and interpreting stark data, and thus coined the term information architect as a way to systematically comprehend.

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Tufte approaches information with a stark minimalism, Holmes with a playful quality, and Wurman with a complex and colorful organization, but all three reach out to the viewers with their engaging graphics. Designers can easily find clarity in striving for either of the three.

two stories

A

21.5 % of respondents who failed to vote in the 1996 elections said they had no time.

As the world becomes more globalized and the internet expands exponentially, many people feel overwhelmed and overbooked in their daily schedules, and have a hard time escaping and finding time to relax and take their minds off constant worries. Instead of portraying voting as another responsibility, it might help to show it as a break from regular programming and a (perhaps righteous, even) escape to make choices that can easily affect everyday lives.

or

People make many ridiculous excuses or various reasons for not finding time to go to the polls (embarrassing reference: You've Got Mail's Meg Ryan character who was getting her hair done instead). This tactic would be more negative, implying guilt on the public by showing what else people have time to do: stop to get coffee, spend time surfing gossip sites, going out to party, etc. yet can't find time to make it to the polls.

B

In Palm Beach County, FL alone, Tuesday's primary and November's general election will eat up more than 178,400 pounds of paper ballots: that's about 90 tons, or 21 Hummer H2s.

This tactic targets the supposedly "green" tactics that each election promises yet never quite delivers. Optical-scan voting is an electronic scanning system that scans marked paper ballots; it uses technology to tabulate but still wastes an incredible amount of paper. If you've seen the movie Brazil, you know that government paperwork can be incredibly wasteful, and this is just the example. Although electronic voting technology can be vulnerable to hacking or foul play, obviously this has been an issue with manual tabulation as well. By making clear how much waste this method uses, maybe individual voters can make a difference in getting the government to rethink mediocre solutions.