Beautiful Information

This is a favourite. It has been around since October 2010 but – and TEDtalks do this so well – it really breathes life into the subject.

Whilst ‪David McCandless‬ (Information is Beautiful) is a confident and charming orator, it’s also clear that he is talking about a subject that he loves.

He quite rightly tells us that “design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions and information design is about solving information problems. There are indeed a lot of information problems in our society at the moment from the overload and saturation to the breakdown of trust and reliability; run-away scepticism and lack of transparency.”

Sound familiar?

Across the work we do, the messages that we’re asked to communicate are rarely simple but the solutions certainly have to be. Information design that is beautiful can be a great tool for delivering clarity by enhancing the written or spoken word by illustrating and answering specific questions – and like David, we love it. But dare I make the case for a joined up approach here? The best way to benefit from the impact of beautiful infographics is to take an overall strategic editorial approach to your piece of communication and use them to support the thread. It’s such a shame when I see them used in a Clipart kind of way in presentations – it wastes the opportunity and downgrades the experience to fad status. I appreciate that this will be obvious to most, and to (I’m happy to say) all the lovely people we work with, but I think it’s still worth saying.