Some Key Landmarks Of Information Design
Information design is about making content easy for people to understand
. People have designed information since they first started using drawn and written marks to communicate. But the discipline of information design grew up in the 1930s with its roots in the Isotype Institutes transformational approach to information presentation.
This article highlights a few key landmarks in information design.
Gutenberg
The inventor of printing from movable type in the 1450s, was concerned with how to make information in manuscripts available to a wider audience. His invention made mass book production possible, and thus he is a key figure in the history of information access and dissemination.
Robert Estienne
The French printer to King Francois I from around 1539 was the first printer to use the printed book medium as a design language in its own right all previous printers had essentially made their books look as much like manuscripts as possible.
Estienne specialised in the production of bibles and encyclopaedias, thinking about how to make the information in biblical texts more accessible to readers, he was the first to introduce a system of biblical verse numbering. He was also the first to use italic type to distinguish different elements of text. His typographic presentation of information has been described as a miracle of lucid arrangement.
Andreas Vesalius
A Renaissance illustrator of anatomical books, Vesalius revolutionised peoples understanding of anatomy. Before Vesalius, anatomy was taught from non-illustrated text books based on the work of the ancient Greek scholar Galen. Galens texts, though littered with errors, were regarded as sacrosanct, and anatomy scholars were prohibited from dissecting dead bodies.
Vesalius performed dissections himself on actual bodies that he removed under the cover of darkness, and he then made accurate drawings, and oversaw subsequent wood engravings and printing. As a result, scholars had accurate anatomical references, and Vesalius is regarded as the father of modern anatomical medicine.
William Playfair
Through his Commercial and Political Atlas, Playfair pioneered the graphic presentation of statistics. He saw that readers could grasp the shape and underlying pattern of statistical data if it was presented graphically rather than as rows of numbers in tables.
He didnt actually invent the bar graph, but he used it along with line-charts and surface charts to compile many sets of data into single charts. His methods of presentation formalised graphical statistical methods, such as consistently placing time on the horizontal axis, for example.
Isotype
the International System for typographic picture education, devised by Otto and Marie Neurath brought clarity to statistical presentation in the 1930s. In showing quantities, symbols were used to represent a fixed quantity with greater quantities shown by the repetition of symbols, not by enlarging the symbol. This made it much easier for readers to make real comparisons, and understand the data in greater detail.
In understanding the need to make information understandable by the audience, the term transformer was coined to represent the process of mediating between the expert author and the reader. The Neuraths understanding of transformation went beyond the concept of commercial design that had evolved by that time, and really marks the beginning of our understanding of
information design.
Henry Beck
Beck designed the London Underground diagram in 1933. Beck understood that readers of the existing maps that were overlaid on Londons streets did not need the complexity of the detailed geographical layout.
His diagram presented all underground lines as horizontal, vertical or 45% diagonals all other angles were removed. It also enlarges the central area in relation to the diagram as a whole, and the diagram essentially became a schematic representation rather than an accurate map, emphasising its connections over the geography of London.
The diagram is a landmark in information presentation of this kind, and has, of course, also become a graphic icon.
by: Andrew Boag
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