Election cycles are always great opportunities to explore new ways of displaying complicated information. As TV and the internet give us unfettered access to more and more data, the problem of making sense of it all gets magnified exponentially. There are a number of people doing incredible work in this field, both in print and online, and I've been sampling some of the results for the last few weeks.

Today I ran across this map of newspaper endorsments in the 2008 election, and I thought it was worth a mention. Not only is the map view useful, but the depth of the information is fantastic; they're showing multiple layers for each individual data point in a pleasing and useful way. Notice that the undecided newspapers are almost invisible, which I didn't like at first. Below that is a side-by-side bar chart with a nicely-designed rollover display of data, which gives an alternate view of the information.

Oh the memories!
The creativity that seems to be coming out during this election is really amazing.

Labels: advertising, funny, politics

I received an email from Moveon.org alerting me to the video below: "Holly, you're in this video."

Awesome use of technology: creative, engaging, viral like heck, and hilarious.





Check out the full page, and make yer own...

I've recently found myself with a lot of TV viewing time; my wife and I have a newborn daughter, which means we spend a lot of the day quietly convincing her to sleep, or staying very still so that she might stay that way. Skipping around the channels over the last week, I've noticed that CNN has been using a clever, if cliched design device to brand their coverage of the presidential debates: a faux "show print" look.  They've adopted a quick and dirty block-letter look to frame the various debates and their participants, which lends an air of Americana and down-home folksiness to a public proceeding that has been bled dry of any real content or substance. Strangely, I can find only the barest hint of this branding carried over on their "Election Center" website as evidenced but the stars in the header bar and the odd advertisement. Still, despite the lack of continuity—and an honest-to-goodness connection between design style and subject—I couln't help but be reminded of two famous poster shops specializing in this unique style, and I did a little digging into their history to satisfy my curiosity.

Hatch Show Print was founded in Nashville in 1879, specializing in handbills and posters for events like carnivals, circuses, and vaudeville acts. In the 1920's, the beginning of country music's golden age, the shop flourished, and the unique carving and design style of Will Hatch elevated their product from workaday advertising to something above and beyond folk art.  The company has changed hands several times over the last few decades, but is now safely part of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and it continues to produce high quality posters for a wide variety of show business clients. For more information on Hatch, I recommend Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop by Kingsbury, Sherrarden, and Horvath. It chronicles the history of the shop from its earliest days and is full of pictures and examples of their work.

Here in Baltimore, we have the Globe Poster Company, founded fifty years after Hatch, but catering to an identical clientele. Globe also used woodblock letterpress on its earliest runs, and later became known for its multi-inked designs featuring neon colors and handcut lettering. I talked to a friend who worked at Globe in the mid 1980's, and she told me their process at that time had not been changed for decades: Artists in the screen shop cut sheets of rubylith and they used this to silkscreen blocks of color onto blank paper. These blanks were then moved to the letterpress area, where a mixture of wooden and metal type was composed in forms and run in black ink over the color to produce the final product. Looking at their catalog of current offerings, it's clear a computer has since been installed as a typesetter, ending the unique authenticity of the hand-cut and composited designs, but they have continued to produce posters and other advertising materials to the present day.

Eight years ago, I bought four reproduction Globe posters from a hastily built Geocities storefront. Each print is on heavyweight 24 pound cardstock, and because the examples span several decades, the evolution of their production methods are clearly evident. Earlier prints are more refined, have a cohesive design, and use the medium to its fullest potential. Type is knocked out of the colored areas, the black plates are custom-built, and design elements are more common: stars, flames, halftoned portraits, an publicity shots. In later prints, the design is modular, colored blocks are simpler and solid, while the type is restrained and geometric, lacking the dynamism of the earlier years. On all of the prints, the black letterforms are rounded with age, uneven, and smudged. Halftones are blown out. Registration is off, sometimes by inches. In short, they are perfect. They are a unique mixture of practical advertising and decorative design, stripped of all unnecessary ornamentation, balancing the message with simple shapes and color for maximum visual impact.

If you're a fan of historical advertising, or of blues, country, or soul music (I am both), there should be something to interest you in the catalog of either shop.

When I'm at a party and casually asked the question "What do you do?" (usually posed over a plastic cup of beer at a cookout), I respond with a vague, "I make web sites, you know," and wave my hand in a large circle as though including the entire Internet in my summation. I would never, ever, answer "I'm an information architect." Because that would be embarrassing.

It's hard enough getting someone to grasp the amount and extent of work involved in creating 'what you see' when you're online: the underlying structure, navigation, organization, buttons and bling, etc. My relatives and neighbors can understand the basic idea of making websites – sort of. Thank goodness few of them ever ask a follow-up question...

We've recently begun a home renovation project. After living in the house for two years and coming to a rough idea of what we want to DO with our space, we've hired an architect. His job is to take our grandiose ideas and binder of torn magazine pages, couple them with the existing structure and produce a workable blueprint for crafting the building into something meeting both our dreams and our needs, within physical (and budgetary) limits.

At our first meeting, we asked about the architect's process for tackling a project. It looks something like this: meet with clients, gather ideas, develop a rough approach, meet with clients again and work to refine blueprints, deliver final drawings for the builder to use. Wow. I got it. I understand that process because it's what I use to 'build' online.

I sit down with clients, gather their ideas for a website -- shift through the must-have features and the love-to-do ideas. I dig into the technology to figure out the foundations; develop a sitemap to define the key areas and uses of space and where to put the 'furniture' (content and assets); refine the approach with the client and then deliver a final blueprint for the developers to build or remodel a website.

Of course, problems arise in both realms, and for similar reasons. Our architect went on vacation overseas and neglected to include some of the 'must-haves' when briefing his assistant and the master bath approaches reflected none of our requirements; my client last week neglected to include some of their 'must-haves' during a brainstorming session, and now the sitemap needs tweaking in order to accommodate them.

Finally, I'm beginning to warm up to the title of Information Architect. I'm comfortable defining myself as a virtual architect of online spaces—making the web a better place, one website at a time. I just don't think I'm ready to explain it over a beer just yet, but ask me next summer...