Help You?
By Craig M. Kanarick and Stephen Turbek
The first "Dynamic Digital Design" column (Web Techniques, April '96) featured an overview of six areas of dynamic digital design. This column will concentrate on information design, the art of representing data that both explains and tells a story. Charts, graphs, maps, tables, lists, guides, and diagrams allow viewers to discover truths buried in a mound of potentially disjointed elements. Information design can make large sets of values quickly understandable and reveal trends and patterns in a collection. The Web allows access to an ever-increasing amount of information and data: financial information—such as stock prices and annual report balance sheets—sports scores, news headlines, results of Internet searches, corporate databases, phone numbers, and weather conditions. Because people typically spend very little time at Web sites, the design of information is one of the most important factors in a site's success.
Brief History
Information design started in the mid-1700s with William Playfair, a Scottish economist, and J.H. Lambert, a Swiss-German scientist. Playfair is famous for creating some of the first statistical graphs, which featured numerical values plotted against time.
From these humble beginnings, information design evolved into a field used mostly by statisticians, financiers, and cartographers. The advent of computational devices forever changed the art of information design, since the computer could not only generate enormous sets of data, but also assist in presenting it.
