THE WEEK IN DESIGN 16

Information is beautiful.

Or if you prefer, to paraphrase Roberto Benigni, L'informazione è bella

Unusually, opening this week with the inspiration links.  Dan Roulstone has us all looking at an awards site set up by market researchers Kantar.

It's of great interest, since its premise is the collaboration between journalism, design and experience.

Partly because we aspire to the level of beauty attained in some of these pieces, mostly because we have the ambition to work to a collaborative approach which potentially attains such nirvana.

The site interface:

http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/

Last years winner:

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/war.casualties/index.html

So; what is our current aspiration/success coefficient?

The Allergy design from last week was one of the most elegant seen on the channel.  It looks like an Apple interface and in terms of pure communication is close to perfection

Beautiful simplicity, clean, clear, crisp treatment, easily digestible figures and relevant proportional splits all contribute to making the Debt sequence successful.  By cleaning up the screen and 

not over complicating the storytelling, we have arrived at communication in almost its purest form and yet we still entertain  and draw in the user.

There was a lot of debate around the maternity designs this week and initially they were less than successful.  What is inspiring, is that by everyone questioning relevance, legibility, style and 

Treatment, we ultimately arrived at something much more communicative and particularly stylish.

If we look at what's been achieved in the 3 previous examples, then look at the School Dinners design, there is a world of difference.  It follows many of the rules; bold imagery, 

text in free space, clear information and it communicates well, so why does it fail?  Broadly speaking, everything could be done better.  Image selection is good, but looks dated, text could 

easily have been bedded into the surface and the angles would have added dynamism.  The drop shadow is not required and the iconography is throw-away

The design for smog is another difficult one to define.  Overall, it's just beige and this leads to the design lacking impact and focus.  The only consistency across the animates is the background

and this could lead the viewer to disconnect, therefore we lose communication.  This could so easily have been different.  It's crying out for a designer solution, something using smoke 

and clear space…

…and yet…maybe this is too clean; too designed.  I look at these frames and ask myself, which one communicates grime, poor air quality, a dirty atmosphere…

So the point is, we can create visually stunning design, but let's be careful that in our quest for beauty, we do not lose sight of relevance and communication of the subject.

CDE.

C.