Author: Deb

Of all the interviews in The Functional Art, the interview with Stefanie Posavec is my favorite.

Alberto Cairo: How did you do the graphics? Did you do use any scripts to count the words, organize them, sort them according to themes, etc.?

Stefanie Posavec: Believe it or not, I didn’t. I did it all by hand.

The Functional Art, p. 343

Wow.

I am aware that I need to automate, but sometimes I feel that it’s important to spend that kind of time gathering your information by hand. It feels a little more natural. Also, it creates bonds with what you are working on: I had to read On the Road over and over again, so the outcome was as much a representation of the text as it is a representation of the novel in my head, of my experience of exploring it.

Stefanie Posavec, The Functional Art, p. 343

Stefanie’s reply resonates with me so much yet, I have to give this more thought as I’m sleep deprived and my head is a bit scrambled from switching mind gears for each project, but here’s the immediate thought: As a graduate student in an interactive media program, naturally, there is great focus on code and digital. While people, through emphasis on user experience and user research, are at the center of what students create, I’ve often wondered if students, my classmates, feel a connection to the experiences they are creating.

Does that sound weird? I can hear the other side of myself asking, “Why do we need to connect with what we are creating?”

Seriously though, do screens and the code that have been designed to help us making things more efficiently, disconnect us from the experience, the tactile and physical nature of human movement, of making? By removing the slowness of making by hand and touching materials disconnect us as makers, as designers?

When is the last time you really looked at a book and didn’t take it for granted?

I’ve designed photo books where I’ve worked with photographers editing with printed thumbnails and taking those sequences to InDesign and printing tons of dummies, mockups to get a feel for the experience. Then if I could be so lucky, see the book printed.

But I gotta say, nothing compares to literally making a book. I personally am not very good at it as I’m a beginner but when you make a book by hand, you start to truly understand and appreciate every page, measurement, type placement, paper (oh the paper!), fold, stitch and more. It feels more personal.

What is our relationship with books? What is your relationship with books? What is a book?

It’s clear I love paper books. I suppose it isn’t “right” to love paper books in this age of climate change, waste, trash and environmental impact but I can’t help it. It’s an emotional relationship. I love the simplicity of interactions: using your hands and a pen to highlight words, jot down notes in the margins, fold the corners to book mark a page … The fact that you can bring it anywhere (well, depending on size and weight), you don’t need electricity though you may need a light when it is dark.

Above all, I understand more when I read from printed words. I’m not sure what it is but if I read, highlight, and write in a book, I retain the information more. It just isn’t the same with the Kindle, PDFs, or web-based books. If paper books ever disappear, I’m going to be in trouble.

Stefanie’s visualization, Writing Without Words: Sentence Drawings of every sentence from On the Road is the transformation of the experience of the book. It is beautiful, poetic, musical. It looks like an expression of our natural world. Looking at it, I’m reminded of mold, of crystallization, of the beauty of science and biology.

It’s always about awe and wonder for me. That’s why I have decided to call myself a data illustrator, rather than a data visualizer. The reason is that I really like the idea of using data to communicate more subjective concepts about the topics I cover. Everything is accurate in my graphics, but they are not necessarily designed just for efficiency, they are not always what you would call information design.

Stefanie Posavec, The Functional Art, p. 348

Sometime I think in the age of digital we have forgotten about awe and wonder; to look at the world as new beings, like children.

Yet, the side of me that loves technology has experienced awe and wonder in multi-layered experiences, especially in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) … Magic Leap being one of my favorites along with Tilt Brush on the Oculus.

Perhaps it isn’t a choice…it isn’t binary but a place where I want to sit; where I want to practice. Hmm…

Stefanie’s interview reminds me that I don’t ever want to be removed from what I create or heaven forbid, dispassionate. Emotions are healthy as much as they can be annoying. They are as beautiful as they are difficult to experience through others and within ourselves.

Well, here it is. My first data visualization for Professor Cairo’s Intro to Data Visualization course.

The project brief: Create a visualization of financial hardship in Florida based on The A.L.I.C.E. Report provided by United Way. Requirements included:

• Tell a compelling focus or narrative
• Deliver a tabloid sized visualization
• Deliver a mobile version
• Apply all we have read and learned so far from lectures and our readings

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Above are just a sample of my notes and outlining in an attempt to get a clearer picture of what story I wanted to tell. There’s a lot of repetition and it is reflective of feeling paralyzed as I was drowning in ideas and data. Apparently, this feeling is normal. This intel reinforces the fact that calling the experts is a must-do.

I learned a lot from this project and these are the top three:

Sketch early and often. Use the same data and try different visualizations. This is key for me. The benefit of experience is that I know my self and I need to see to understand and learn. Tools like Flourish make sketching much easier and faster.

Keep organized. I have to come up with a folder structure toute suite and at the moment, I decided to add the source to the beginning of the folder and files of the data I download. I was swimming in Excel files. Nothing is worse than spending the time hunting among hundreds of files for the source of the data.

Stop digging and start making. This is related to my first lesson on sketching early and often. Seriously, I could have gone on for weeks plunging deeper and deeper on the interconnectedness of our policies and the effect on our communities. It is easy to get sidetracked and lose focus. Still, what you find sometimes can be gems for other visualizations!

One more major project to go …

I do not suck at math

”I do not suck at math. I do not suck at math. I do not suck at math …”
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can …”

The enormous hurdle in my mind that I’ve been working through as I learn about visualization is the math required to properly, truthfully visualize a story. This is not easy as I have believed over the past 30 plus years that I. Suck. At. Math. I’ve shared this fear of math before and I have been training my self to be more positive. I bought some books and at every opportunity I try to practice.

Still, the negative experiences I buried for decades feel like they just happened yesterday and this chapter in The Truthful Art about confidence intervals immediately made my want to close the book. Dramatic perhaps but as a kid who was scolded so many times for not understanding (translation: stupid), the first opportunity to avoid those experiences were a blessing. So for years I managed to avoid situations where I would never have to deal with math.

Yet here I am and planning to keep going. There are pattens in life worth breaking or resolving and I’m determined to re-craft my narrative. So, I have to read this chapter again and again and I think it is going to take more than books to help me feel confident in my abilities. It might be time for a tutor or a summer class.

Papers that don’t report significance, effect sizes, and power together deserve extra skepticism, as a general rule.

The Truthful Art, p. 324

Keep Asking Questions

I’ve learned over the years not to be duped by fancy names or titles and somewhere during my career, I figured out that surrounding myself with people who knew more than I or complemented my skills were key to doing great work… as a team.

Off the top of my head, here are just a few people who have helped shape me as a designer in no particular order:

• Michael Kellams
• Emily Escalante
• Tina Ullman
• David Pratt
• Jerry Sealy
• Norie Quintos
• Leigh Borghesani
• Bill Marr
• David Griffin
• Trish Reynales
• My husband

Of course there are many others—colleagues (designers, reporters, editors, photographers) and people I’ve never met whose work I’ve admired or whose books and articles have inspired me and challenged how I think.

I started my design career in newspapers interning at The Seattle Times, then went on to The Globe and Mail, Copley Sun Publications, The Chicago Tribune and off to National Geographic Traveler magazine. My focus at that time was on photography. I worked with picture editors and photographers in packaging and presenting stories where the photographs were the lead visuals.

So, as the completion of the semester, this class, and my first year approaches, I find myself reflecting on what has transpired in the past 7-8 months. A lot has happened and one thing I didn’t anticipate was the desire to return to the “newsroom”. I never thought I would want to pursue data visualization, especially because it doesn’t come naturally to me.

The secret behind any successful data project is asking people who know a lot about the data at hand and its shortcomings, about how it was gathered, processed, and tested.

The Truthful Art, p. 316

Asking questions is paramount to collaboration, understanding people, and being a responsible designer. I’m used to working with others, experts, so honestly, my first visualization for this class made me nervous. I was uncomfortable and uncertain about the data because of my inexperience. I did my best and the project comes with a giant asterisk (* school project!) but I suppose I had to start somewhere.

At least I know for certain that I need to learn more about understanding data and ramp up my math skills. I also have to remind myself that I just started in January. So patience, where are you?

[O]ur main goal should be to tell a story clearly by achieving order and having some sort of narrative through each graphic. Any project should start by analyzing what your story is about and then finding the best way to tell it by splitting it up into easily digestible chunks, without losing depth.

John Grimwade, Interview in The Functional Art, p. 213

At the recommendation of Professor Cairo, I subscribed to the print version of The New York Times and last week, the first edition arrived at my doorstep. (I can’t remember the last time this happened – remember the newspaper delivery boys?) Immediately, I started to dive into the sections with my coffee and stumbled upon this story and visualization:

It immediately grabbed my attention because I’ve been a bit obsessed with climate change as of late. Perhaps it is living in Miami where the weather is such a contrast to Upstate New York and I cannot help feel those contrasts when I’m here and my husband is in the bitter cold. We talk often about which condition is better — more months of extreme heat or extreme cold?

But getting back to the story and visualization, it makes me want to understand what other countries are doing and why it is so hard for the U.S. to adopt these policies? What are the pros and cons? What are the hurdles? In fact, could The New York Times please follow up? This was a great teaser, I want more.

So, I went online to see if the interactive version revealed anything different.

No luck but I enjoyed the difference in experience.

My preference? The print version. Why? I could get a better sense of the story as a whole. The contrast between our possible trajectory based on current policy, how it relates to the Paris Treaty and how, if we implemented some of the same policies adopted by other countries would change earlier stated trend.

(Side note: This makes me wonder if anyone has done a study on the differences of how people perceive the same visualizations differently on screen or in print; like what information is process and what isn’t? And, would that depend on say, education level?)

“We are the Interface”

John Grimwade, graphics editor at Condé Nast Traveler magazine shares how working with reporters and editors taught him to “strive for clarity because we are the interface between a chaotic world of information and the user who wants to understand something. If we can’t bring users clarity, I think we have kind of failed, actually.” (The Functional Art, p. 216)

I haven’t thought about my experiences working at newspapers and magazines for a long time. I miss it in many ways and for many reasons but those days seem long gone since newspapers and magazine have changed dramatically. Still, there are some exciting things happening as companies reimagine what the future of publishing looks like. The New York Times, Vice President of Engineering, Brian Hamman, was a featured speaker at the 2019 Computation and Journalism Symposium last month and it was an exciting look at how they seem to be evaluating and re-evaluating the lifecycle of stories, the products they create and how these stories and products live in the system of the publishing cycle. It’s a fascinating undertaking.

It is fascinating to think of how a visualization or story lives within the world and the relationships it could have with future stories or past stories. This makes me think about how clarity and context are even more vital as content gets repackaged, repurposed, re-tweeted, re-, re-, re …

I haven’t done a deep dive into how much content is shared without its context but I’m sure it is scary. So, this makes me wonder. If “good design is not about mastering technology, but about facilitating clear communication and the understanding of relevant issues”, (p.213, Alberto Cairo about John Grimwade’s style and approach) then clarity and context becomes even more important today. Designers may not need to master technology but it behooves designers to understand how technology can determine how what is created lives within the world now and in the future. The annotation layer or even the metadata, it seems, becomes even more critical. I haven’t thought this through entirely and not sure I can alone but what happens when visualizations lose their context?

Content is King

Raise your hand if you have started to design straight on the computer.

I’ve heard and read this axiom many times. Whether it is King or Queen, all I know is that you can’t design without understanding the content. Without understanding the content, you can’t possibly provide clarity or context. So, in that sense, frankly, your design is destined to fail.

When I was teaching, many non-design students would get excited about an idea and start working on the computer even though I emphasized the importance of sketching. Perhaps it is the (understandable) fear of “not being able to draw” yet what they failed to comprehend is that it isn’t an efficient way to design especially when one is learning how to use the software as well.

Here’s what John Grimwade had to say about working straight on the computer:

[It’s] a very bad way to start. You make a lot of art decisions and then trap yourself into them. I constantly see graphics that have been done like that. A big image or illustration was put in the middle first then the designer tried to make all the other elements in the composition work around it, instead of coming up with a solid structure that would hep tell the story you need to tell.

Jim Grimwade, p. 218, The Functional Art

Chances are you’ve created buckets and then forcing your content into those buckets rather than structuring information and creating shapes based on the content and the priority of content. This is when I’ve seen my students commit “design crimes” of all kinds: Changing the vertical scale of type to make it fit, tracking out type to fit, distorting an image by one percent, and more …

Sketching is a great way to be non-committal. It is a way to think through work; similar to writing draft after draft of an essay. Ideally, each version sheds some light and builds to the final. What I love about sketching and mapping out relationships even with words is that it helps me identify questions and holes. What am I missing? What doesn’t makes sense? Those questions are just as important as what is present and how it looks.

Before you think about style, you must think about structure.

Alberto Cairo, p. 154, The Functional Art.

What I love about design is that it is a process, a way of thinking about the whole and the parts. I’m thrilled I didn’t give it up.

Here’s the dirty little secret about data: it’s always noisy and uncertain.

Alberto Cairo, p. 112, The Truthful Art

Honestly, I never really gave uncertainty much critical thought until I stumbled upon Visualizing Uncertain Weather a 2017 article by Jen Christiansen in Scientific American (Who was mentioned in the article? Professor Cairo) where she talks about snowfall, Winter Storm Stella and moves into how hurricane visualizations are problematic.

Living in Syracuse, New York where tracking winter weather is like a part-time job, her article made me think about all the times forecasters would predict major snow madness and nothing much would happen. It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Sound the alarm enough with no need and people start to ignore the alarm. Heck, even the cashiers at the local grocery chain, Wegmans, make fun of people who, in their minds, overreact to winter warnings.

I’m one of the overreactors. If there is a storm on the way, I’m going to prepare. Blame my dad. “Always be prepared”, he advised. Plus, here’s the deal: weather shifts. It isn’t some linear condition. There are many variables.

So, now that I’m back in school, I’m thinking: why don’t weather apps do what the National Weather Service does for snow accumulation as Jen had pointed out? All I get are text reports which help to some degree but a visualization would be more effective.

Speaking of hurricanes, I confess I’m nervous about one landing while I’m in school. So, I decided that as soon as any hurricane is considered a Category 3 I’m out. Some apartment neighbors say you can hold it out in a Category 4. Given that most hurricane maps fail to show uncertainty and the scope of its impact, I’m not taking any chances. The traffic alone is a reason to start exiting as soon as possible.

I digress.

Reading more about uncertainty in The Truthful Art brought to mind another article by Jen in Scientific American that I came across through a tweet from Professor Cairo before I started his class: Visualizing Science: Illustration and Beyond It’s a lengthy article but one that I found fascinating as Jen took me on a journey through her experiences as an illustrator, infographer, art director, and I think, educator.

She ends with uncertainty and provides rich examples of how uncertainty has been expressed visually. Reading the entire article again, I’ve understand what she offers differently because I’ve learned more about visualization since my first read. It’s even more a keeper of an article and one I’ll continue to refer back to given the plethora of resources, tips and ideas she presents.

Being a beginner … again.

All of us who do creative work, like you know, we get into it and we get into it because we have good taste, but its like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste, is still killer …

Ira Glass, Storytelling

I confessed in a previous post that I’ve always been scared of math. Over time, I’ve come to believe I’m not good at math nor good with numbers. But when I read Professor Cairo’s retelling of Professor Richard Thaler’s experiment with an exam, I laughed out loud.

Basically, Professor Thaler changed the maximum score of a test from 100 points to 137 points. When the exam was 100 pts, the average score was 72. When the exam was 137 pts, the average score was 96.

“Exams will have a total of 137 points rather than the usual 100. This scoring system has no effect on the grade you get in the course, but it seems to make you happier”

Richard Thaler, p. 122, para. 3, The Truthful Art

The visualization Professor Cairo presents shows the hilarity of the experiment.

Perhaps why I’ve come to love data visualization in just a few short weeks is because the good ones help me understand numbers, relationships and more importantly, the stories behind the numbers. Plus, I love information, organizing it, structuring it and even more, helping people understand it.

Of course, the frustrating aspect is that I’m still learning how to find data and then understand the raw information. My frustration is that I have so many questions and stories I want to tell but lack the skills at the moment to execute. I have to remember to be patient when it comes to all this “newness”.

“Encoding” is a new term for me; however, “mapping data into visual properties”, makes perfect sense. I still struggle with which type of visualization would be the most appropriate but what I enjoy most about learning visualization is that I’m learning a process; a structure or framework that gives what I create a strong foundation based in reasoning.

Don’t misunderstand. As a designer I learned early on with mentors and working with my colleagues to base my decisions on audience, metrics, goals, etc. But what I’ve learned so far through the Interactive Media program has essentially provided me with Super Glue. Glue that provides me with the terminology and methods to give cogency to design ideas or solutions. It’s a feeling of empowerment.

“Plot what you need to plot.” For some reason reading this allowed me to let out air. It is a version of sketching and iteration. You need to explore to see. This seems so apropos to why I’m back in school; a reminder for when I’m exhausted and wondering what I’ve done by taking myself out of the workforce for two years.

Learning is exploration. I’m iterating my designer Self. I’m exploring the “unknown unknowns” by starting with the basics.