Does time equal quality in good infographics? Nope, not necessarily. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately and, in reading recent posts by Seth Godin and Alberto Cairo, it’s interesting to see how each touches upon what I see as the pressures and attitudes that affect how well we design good information graphics.
In Mr. Godin’s case, he mentions what he calls “the attention paradox.” While he’s not specifically writing about design, his comments nonetheless aptly relate to the work designers do. As more marketers crave attention, the more they’re willing to part with content that is good at reaching an audience, and terrible at retaining it. Makes sense, right? In a time in which we’re increasingly consumed with tracking metrics and measuring success by the numbers it is par for the course to get caught up in the rat race for the next big thing (big being determined by 30-second relevance and traffic for that day). Surprisingly, information graphics are no exception. And why should they be?
I recently mentioned that, because we’re all under pressure to create more and more content, “repurposing” content is seen as a good way to take advantage of the sweat equity put into other pieces (web articles, reports, data collection) and to convert that into an infographic. This pressure to produce can have real drawbacks–clients mistakenly assume that information can be quickly “designed” just because in their estimation, the facts and the message have already been proscribed. Here–quality can suffer from lack of time. But the point that I was really getting at in my post, which I unfortunately failed to articulate clearly–was the designer’s role.
When designers are treated as service desks and not content experts (“Here are the facts, here is the message, now please make this pretty. Call me when you’re done.”), you simply don’t get the best work.
Fortunately, Alberto Cairo, in “Empower your infographics, visualization, and data teams” gets to the point. According to Mr. Cairo (and I agree) the real problem is the limited perception of the designer’s role. He mentions how, in news rooms, graphic designers are often seen as “service desks.” This isn’t limited to news rooms. In my own life, I occasionally get requests to design graphics “you know, like the New York Times” (yes, I really do). As Mr. Cairo points out, we all laud the New York Times and other large media outlets (one of my personal favorites is New Scientist) for their high-quality information graphics–pieces that can take months to make with large teams of content producers and designers in place. I agree with Mr. Cairo’s perspective that this fact might lead you to erroneously conclude that time and staffing (more people, more time) equals great work (bluntly, he says, “You can’t.”).
The solution lies, in part, in treating and using your designers as partners who help to shape content effectively.
So, what does this mean, exactly? Bring your designer into the room when you’re having editorial discussions about how to create content, before you’ve decided on what shape that content will take. Listen to your designers and expect them to offer up ideas about how to turn that into information design (be it static, motion or interactive).
Designers should read the content.
Expect your designer to read, read, read and understand. I ask my designers to read research reports before they create infographics or data visualizations. This may be a “duh” moment to some of you, but you’d be surprised how many people (including designers) don’t think of this or, worse, don’t see this as part of the designer’s role. How do you design what you don’t understand? How do you filter out the best parts of information and data without having reviewed the source?
And don’t micromanage the design. Leave them alone to create and use their expertise. Trust them, as content partners, to visualize not just the data, not just the facts, but the voice that carries the design.
I’m sure there’s more and would love to hear from you about what other recommendations you have.