The essential, full-color guide to understanding information design and how to make it better
Featuring hundreds of full-color problems and examples, this comprehensive guide discusses and illustrates approaches to designing complex data and information for meaning, relevance, usability, and clarity. Described and analyzed in lucid text and over 500 illustrations, examples include successful, compromised, and failed designs covering everything from parking signs and road and statistical maps to explanations of the appropriate use of line, color, and form. The book provides incisive and useful insights into the process of visualizing complex information and communicating it in a simple, honest, and accessible form. Some of the many topics covered include:
- The nature of information
- How we perceive, communicate, and understand
- Dimensionality, proximity, numbers, and scale
- Organization and typography
- Movement, orientation, and situational geography
Praise for Designing Information
“This is a terrific book.
“I began working with Joel Katz 40 years ago. We learned from observing each other, which allowed us to discover maps that lead to understanding.
“This volume is just that.
“The journey from not knowing to knowing is from ignorance to understanding, from complexity to clarification. This book was done by one of the few who have mastered what I used to call ‘information architecture,’ and what I perhaps should have called ‘understanding architecture.’
“The book itself is a diagram of clarification, containing hundreds of examples of work by those who favor the communication of information over style and academic postulation—and those who don’t.
“Many blurbs such as this are written without a thorough reading of the book. Not so in this case. I read it and love it.
“I suggest you do the same.”
—Richard Saul Wurman
From the Back Cover
The essential, full-color guide to understanding information design and how to make it better
Featuring hundreds of full-color problems and examples, this comprehensive guide discusses and illustrates approaches to designing complex data and information for meaning, relevance, usability, and clarity. Described and analyzed in lucid text and over 500 illustrations, examples include successful, compromised, and failed designs covering everything from parking signs and road and statistical maps to explanations of the appropriate use of line, color, and form. The book provides incisive and useful insights into the process of visualizing complex information and communicating it in a simple, honest, and accessible form. Some of the many topics covered include:
- The nature of information
- How we perceive, communicate, and understand
- Dimensionality, proximity, numbers, and scale
- Organization and typography
- Movement, orientation, and situational geography
Praise for Designing Information
“This is a terrific book.
“I began working with Joel Katz 40 years ago. We learned from observing each other, which allowed us to discover maps that lead to understanding.
“This volume is just that.
“The journey from not knowing to knowing is from ignorance to understanding, from complexity to clarification. This book was done by one of the few who have mastered what I used to call ‘information architecture,’ and what I perhaps should have called ‘understanding architecture.’
“The book itself is a diagram of clarification, containing hundreds of examples of work by those who favor the communication of information over style and academic postulation―and those who don’t.
“Many blurbs such as this are written without a thorough reading of the book. Not so in this case. I read it and love it.
“I suggest you do the same.”
―Richard Saul Wurman
About the Author
Joel Katz is an internationally known information designer and authority on the visualization of complex information. He teaches information design at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His design work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kyoto. His photography has been exhibited in the United States and Europe. He is coauthor, with Alina Wheeler, of Brand Atlas and is a founding member of AIGA Philadelphia.
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