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.

Schiphol clock

Paul Mijksenaar has a new blog which as you'd expect is worth following (I've added it to the list on the right).

He's also launched some nice tee shirts and other things decorated with his Schiphol airport pictograms, and I'm very pleased with my new clock.

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).

The King Canute signage awards, 2009: entry 1

Obviously these no smoking signs will prevent the smoke from passers-by reaching the folk sat in the chairs at this open air coffee stand in Broad Street, Reading.

Happy Christmas

Thanks to Paul Matson for sending me this (from Stansted Airport). Happy Christmas everyone.

Disappointing

Graphic designers have a noble role to play in news communication through diagramming and graphic explanation. But they seem to have turned instead to the naff branding of news stories. Channel 4's graphic treatment of the Mumbai terrorism was breathtakingly crass, with its fake hindi curry house logo.

Quite big

A while ago I posted a note about the Michelin guides' francocentric use of the Eiffel Tower as a unit of comparative height. Now I've found a copy of their New York guide to illustrate the point. The usual point of these pictures is to impress you with the size of the new object, as compared with the known one. In this case we think 'wow, I didn't realise the Eiffel Tower was so big'. I think this is something approaching bad manners in a guide book - rather like dining with friends, and complimenting them that the meal was slightly better that the one you cooked yourself that day for lunch.

A life explained

Thanks to Paul Luna for showing me this homage to infographics. It's by the French agency H5 (I loved their other stuff too - have a look at 'wuz', which has a great ending).



Since I first posted this, the link has been removed from Youtube, but you can see it on the H5 website - go to Film/Clip/Royksopp.

And I've just been told (thanks, Brian) you can download it on iTunes (seach for 'Remind me').

Slippery jazz hands man

I love the jazz hands on this stick man.

For years I was an embarrassment on family holidays by constantly stopping to take photos of whatever it was we were designing at the time: airport signs or payphone user instructions were favourites. So it was nice to get this photo sent to my phone by my son Alex, overcome by a sad genetic urge to snap a sign for the first time. It's only a matter of time before he inherits my baldness too.

News graphics

I recently made the acquaintance of Max Gadney - he's responsible for news graphics at the BBC (or at least I think he may have moved on from that role as, googling him, I find his very information-rich job title is Channel Editor, BBC Two & BBC Four, Vision Multi-Platform team). As a sideline he creates terrific information graphics for World War II magazine, like this one.


Have a look at his website.

Max also told me about the Society for News Design.

Diagrams and irony

There are various websites around that collect data graphic interpretations of pop songs - they're good for a chuckle until you tire of them. One that's been doing the rounds is this nice graphic from Evita (credited to brianmn).



To be literal minded for a moment, I could point out that the song doesn't actually suggest that anyone should 'cry for me' – because, after all, 'I never left you'. Or perhaps it is ironic and suggests that Argentina should actually be crying. But of course, diagrams don't do irony very well.

This next one (credited to sftekbear) shows another limitation of its chosen format. There are in fact fifty ways to leave your lover, only a few of which are specified in the song, and they are not given comparative frequencies as implied by this chart.

However, a professor writes:

In fact, although Simon (1975) is often quoted as identifying ‘50 ways to leave your lover’, we must treat this figure with caution. Reviewing the primary source, we find that Simon speculates that there ‘must be’ 50 ways, but does not present supporting data, nor does he claim 50 as an exact number.

Only four ways are detailed:

Just slip out the back

Make a new plan

Just drop off the key

Hop on the bus.

Simon makes 2 additional proposals concerning the manner of departure

You don’t need to be coy

You don’t need to discuss much.

A major theoretical problem arises from the lack of a clear categorial distinction between the 4 ways. An alternative view is that these are simply 4 stages of a process model: that is, in combination they describe only one way to leave your lover: 1. Make a new plan; 2. Drop off the key; 3. Slip out the back; 4. Hop on the bus.

However, this view is easily countered by further reference to the original data: Way 1 (slip out the back) specifically applies to a named individual (viz. Jack), whereas Way 2 (make a new plan) is specific to people named Stan. Since the principle underlying the allocation of method to individuals appears to be rhyming, we may reasonably speculate that Way 1 would also be appropriate for persons named Mac, or Zak, while Way 2 is also appropriate for persons named Dan. On this basis we may proceed to a more accurate calculation of the different ways to leave your lover – that is, it must correlate with the number of available names within the population, with allowances made for duplication resulting from homophonic terminal phonemes.

We may, then, posit a direct relationship between available forenames within a particular language, culture, or discourse community and available options for terminating amatory relationships.

This leads to the conclusion that the number of available amor-terminatory strategies is directly proportional to the number of available personal nomenclature allocation options. Some cultures (eg, the UK) permit an infinite range of options, with no rules for spelling (viz, Agnes, Agyness), while others (such as Portugal) require parents to choose from a prescribed list. In Sweden, there is no prescribed list, but parents can be prevented from choosing unusual names. It is therefore tempting to hypothesise that divorce rates in regulated countries should be lower than unregulated countries, since there will be correspondingly fewer ways to leave your lover. This is indeed confirmed by the statistics: UK – 2.7 divorces per 1000 population; Sweden – 2.4; Portugal – 1.9. Of course, this figure should only be properly calculated using data adjusted for the frequency of matching terminal phonemes (which reduce the lover-leaving options within some language groups). And further we may speculate that in unregulated societies, parents may opt for names that, having no suitable rhymes effectively insulate their progeny from the risks of divorce: this may have been the motive of the Swedish parents naming their children Lego, Metallica or Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (see Daily Telegraph, 7June 2008).

We may conclude that further research is necessary.

etc, etc.

Loo signs to love

We've set a summer competition in our department to submit the best photographs of toilet door signs encountered on our holiday. It is hoped that the results will fill an exhibition-like space that has appeared after building work next to our new accessible loos.

Andrew Belsey spotted a great column on the topic by Sathnam Sanghera in this Tuesday's Times.

This prompted a search, which revealed:

coolest-toilet-signs-around-world

The toilet signs project.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

Here's a nice but rather disturbing one I nicked from the coolest-toilet-signs post:

Benefits of dramatic projection

Police procedurals like CSI often include interfaces that the TV detectives use for matching fingerprints or tracking vehicles. These interfaces are unlike any normal ones you find in workplaces - graphic features have to be exaggerated in order to be legible on television. Similarly, ransom notes are always written in large legible writing.

Actually, this how everything should be designed - clear and bold enough to get how it works at first glance. It isn't a bad design principle to ask yourself: how would my interface work on TV?

Indexed blog to be a book

A plug for a wonderful blog (you probably know it already). Jessica Hagy's Indexed blog is full of wonderful Venn diagrams and equations that describe essential life truths. Occasion for the plug now is that it's coming out as a book. Here's a link to it at Amazon. And here's a sample.

French french fries

This table was printed on a poke of chips at a fast food chain in France.


I don't think the lady on the right eats many chips. The bloke, on the other hand... is that his left arm or his tummy?

Web more visual? I don't think so

I occasionally hear people assert, as if a truism, that the web is a much more visual medium than text. I don't think it is. In fact the opposite is often true if you compare two versions of the same document. For example, here's a story from a recent issue of The Guardian newspaper.

The story (about the growth in music downloads) is illustrated by a graph comparing the years 2005 and 2006 in different countries, and also comparing mobile and online downloads. It is also decorated by images of a band, some people dancing in test tubes, and someone singing.
























But compare with the online version. No images (except a portrait of the journalist we didn't see in the paper version), no graph (surely that contains a key message, even if the pictures don't. And the story is surrounded by navigation - links enticing you to stop reading this story and go somewhere else.













On another matter, the pictures in the paper are a veritable semiotic feast: what are the fascist-looking symbols in front of the band? have the test-tube ladies escaped from a story about cloning? and I love the singer's Remembrance Day poppy. Nothing is captioned so we'll never know the explanation.

Nice poster to buy

Get it from Flood the Valley.

Didn't find this myself - saw it first on a nice blog from and/or/if who are document designers I used to work with.

Colour, flags and sensitivity

Working recently for a government department whose corporate colour is green (a kind of greyish, dark green, not exactly emerald or shamrock), we proposed a colour-coding system where orange was among the colours used for navigation.

When someone suggested that this would render the document unacceptable in Northern Ireland, my pedantry alarm went off - surely the juxtaposition of two colours in a coding system does not amount to a flag. But I followed up with a call to the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure in Northern Ireland. After some consultation we turned the orange into orangey-brown.

The DCAL website is in English, Irish and Ulster-Scots. I had no idea that there was an Ulster-Scots language that is still used, but it seems there is, and I followed up the link to the Ulster-Scots Agency (Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch). Predominant colour: orange, so no surprise there.

Money laundering

Eden are an excellent information design consultancy in Amsterdam. They recently came up with new standards for consumer warnings for financial services products (eg, 'investments can go down as well as up'). To simplify the approach, they used washing instructions - a trusted information source - as their inspiration. Have a look at their full case study here.

Stick persons

It's not that often that information design gets into the papers, but you might have seen coverage of the Spanish town of Fuenlabrada that is legislating against sexism in various areas of civic life - including the stick people on pedestrian crossings.

Debate has centred on:

• whether stick 'men' are actually genderless anyway, and represent both sexes
• whether, even if this is the case, it's still sexist, just as using the word 'man' to represent humankind betrays an underlying sexism in the English language (in the sense that 'woman' is a marked form of 'man').
• whether women have to be represented as wearing skirts and pony tails.

This sign outside a gay bar seems to take the view that stick men are in fact men... unless, of course, it is not a gay bar and the stick people are gender neutral.
(Original found at http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i175/mjaffe/DSC00601-1.jpg)

Nigel Holmes's wordless diagrams

At some point when I wasn't looking, people starting wearing their scarves a different way. I always wound mine round my head, or perhaps tied a half hitch. But now people do it differently, and luckily I don't have to describe how because I've just found this diagram in Nigel Holmes's brilliant book of Wordless Diagrams. This one is entitled 'How to wear a scarf European-style'. It also contains masterpieces such as 'How to conduct an orchestra', 'How to wave like a royal', 'How to make sure your coq au vin does not come out rubbery' and many others.

Wordless Diagrams is published by Duckworth, in 2005, and the ISBN is 0 7156 3395 3. Here's a link so you can buy it from Amazon: Wordless Diagrams

Diagram reproduced with Nigel's permission.

Moore's law for razors

I expect this one is much blogged, but I can't resist this diagram from The Economist on the occasion of Gillette launching a five-blade razor, the Fusion.

The story is at http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5624861. Thanks to Mike Williams for pointing me to this.