Information design.
Designing information is not a skill that comes easily to professionals. Information is largely in the form of data, text and images. Most professionals are used to using language to communicate their facts, findings, and information. But language is constrained by words.
Words being the primary tool of communication for language. (Noam Choksy) is what most individuals learn as the primary language of communication.
But according to philosophers, language is not an ideal form of communication of THOUGHT.
We look at 5 principles of Information design and how they aid us in designing information.
1. Communicating Thought, insight, perspectives needs the ability to visualize.
Visualization needs design.
Designing your text, data, images in a story. In essence, you want professionals to understand & learn by viewing.
‘You design for the mind first and then the eye.’ The order is critical.’-
CONTEXT, Datapoint- The tools that you can use – Pre attentive features.,Narrative
2. Facts & findings : These are mostly recorded and then reported.
That is what most professionals are familiar with. It is Insights, Wisdom, Application that is most visionary in nature that needs to be designed. – That’s the thought that is difficult to communicate.
Whats the story – What do you want to HERO?
3. Knowing the intended outcome is important. What you set out to achieve is an important task. Most information deals with decision-making. To enable professionals to make decisions.
Datapoint Range & Depth – Speed breaks – Inflection point
Narrative:
4. Format & structure: While you could be presenting information in mainly 3 forms- verbal, written and video, the framework for it will remain the same. The principles behind it.
5 Balancing elements. Just like not every line has to be italic, not every piece of information needs to be visualized. A particular pain point is numbers. In value form or in number form or what?.
The tactical – small things
- Words- Edward Tufte
Many ways of looking at the same data.
2-3 attributes for the data.
Exploratory.
Units sold –location-wise. Not really. Please keep it simple. Tabular form.
Units sold –location-wise- product category. Good case.
Units sold– location wise- product category- value