Jost Hochuli: In Conversation

Jost Hochuli

Jost Hochuli, the renowned book designer, graphic designer, typographer, printer and author of Designing Books, and Detail in Typography has had a slow but steady impact on modern book design and typography. First, through his work, especially that for VGS and Typotron; then through his teaching at the Schüle für Gestaltung in St. Gallen; and more widely through his publications on typography and book design.

Through these books, especially the English language edition of Designing Books, he has become probably the most influential theorist of book design since Jan Tschichold.

Jost’s belief is that book design is not just concerned with beautiful objects, but rather it is about making useful tools for reading.

Apprenticed to Rudolf Hostettler at Zollikofer Verlag (publishing company) in the 1950’s, anecdotally only two typefaces were permitted in the works – Akzidenz Grotesk and Times New Roman. Working in the modernist style known as Swiss or International school, the goal of the apprentice typographer was to simplify page design and layout so that there was no typographic ‘noise’.

Although we think of the Swiss school as being the dominant style in Europe in the fifties and sixties, in fact it was largely confined to Holland, Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Even within Switzerland, designers in the French-speaking cantons looked to France and Didot, designers in the Italian-speaking cantons to Milan and Bodoni.

Nevertheless, the Swiss school, following the path laid down by the Bauhaus architect, industrial designer and typographer Max Bill won worldwide recognition in the decades following the Second World War

“We were simply louder” said Hochuli.

Bill urged Swiss designers to follow modernist “‘asymmetric’ or organically formed typography”, to reject “the conventional text-image of axial symmetry”.

In response, contemporary designer Jan Tschichold defended the need to design some books “in the manner of traditional typography” while allowing that others might be more suitable done in Bill’s ‘functional’ typography.

As Hochuli developed his style, he was influenced by Tschichold’s plea for “the right to work in the way that I find best”, whether ‘newly revived traditional typography’ or ‘functional typography’.

Although Tschichold never visited the Zollikofer works, Hostettler considering him “A traitor to modernism”, Hochuli followed a middle path between the modernism of the Bauhaus and die neue typographie and traditional book design, before ultimately rejecting the rigidity of the grid.

Preferring to use consistent channels of white space between elements to create harmony on the page, Hochuli’s graphic design practice aimed to capture the feeling of the work through typographic layout that created “adventures on a page”.

Thus echoing the principle ‘form follows function’, Hochuli’s preference is for content to come before design, although, as Hochuli has reiterated on several occasions, the designer must not follow dogma.

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Jost Hochuli was in conversation with Tony Pritchard, LCC senior lecturer and ISTD board member.

In association with International Society of Typographic Designers, London College of Communication, Presence Switzerland and the Swiss Cultural Fund.

1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days

1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days: America's gun crisis – in one chart

The attack at a country music festival in Las Vegas on Monday 2 October 2017 that left at least 58 people dead is the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history – but there were six other mass shootings in America in the previous week alone.

Data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive reveals a shocking human toll: there is a mass shooting – defined as four or more people shot in one incident, not including the shooter – every nine out of 10 days on average.

The graphic, produced by The Guardian US interactive team, a small group of designers, interactive developers and journalists working alongside the editorial team, is horrifying in it's simplicity.

A simple but effective idea demonstrating the power of information graphics to tell a story. As you scroll down, the enormity of the carnage over the last four years becomes apparent, leaving you slack-jawed at the seemingly never-ending toll - an infinite scroll of injury and death.

Get some structure in your life

Time to clean up my desktop.

There are only four rules:

1. Action it
2. File it
3. Delegate it
4. Bin it.

That's all.

You wanted more?

Sorry.

The joy of timesheets

Timesheets. We all hate them. We’ve all got to do them.

Why can’t we just get on with being creative?

But we need to remember that design is a business, and like any other business, to be able to stay in business, we need to remain solvent.

Unlike manufacturing where you can measure the number of units produced, and then price them accordingly to cover your costs, as a professional service we creatives can only charge for our time.

Only if we know the value of our time can we know whether we’re working efficiently, and only if we know how efficiently we work, can we know how much time to allocate to a project.

Allocating time to a project, and thus knowing when we’re under budget and when we’re over budget is the difference between profit and loss.

And measuring time also provides structure to our day, telling us when we’re over-servicing a demanding client (so maybe we should talk about additional fees), and when we can afford to go the extra mile (maybe to help build a relationship with a new client).

Measuring time also informs our professional development by telling us when we’re taking a bit too long to do something, maybe something that requires new software, or more training, or could be passed to a junior, or should be outsourced to a specialist?

So for example, my local garage charges me £25/hour to service my car. I could do it at home, but I haven’t got the right kit, it means getting a bit oily, two trips to a parts supplier and most of Saturday afternoon spent lying in gravel.

Assuming the average design freelance rate of £36/hr, clearly it’s more cost effective to outsource the work to a specialist. However, if I do the work myself (for my own satisfaction), at least I’m doing it in the knowledge that I’m making a small loss (but maybe acquiring new kit and developing a new skill in the process).

It’s an informed cost/benefit business decision that is only made possible thanks to timesheets.

Love ‘em.

UBS - asking the right questions

UBS is a global firm providing financial services to private, corporate and institutional clients.

Their new brand strategy aims to adopt a more thought-provoking and personal approach to clients with a clear tone of voice that cuts through the clutter of a busy financial marketplace.

The rebranding is a full redesign that includes all elements apart from the logo, using both sight and sound with the introduction of an audio tone developed in conjunction with Leicester University.

The first expression of the new brand is a new campaign that demonstrates the power of a simple proposition - the first step to making the right choices is focusing on the right questions.

Client insight and research into what motivates clients across countries and across all client groups identified that some questions stay pretty much the same.

Thus questions form the foundation of the creative concept.

The narrative structure poses questions from different life stages - family, our values, the impact we have on other people - and suggests that asking the right questions can make things a little clearer.

The brand film of simple black text on a while background shows hypothetical questions asked by clients, whilst press adverts, using images shot by Annie Leibovitz in a muted colour palette, present personal stories as case studies.

The questions and case studies form a powerful story arc that engages the viewer by allowing them to project their own answers into the narrative.

And of course there’s a great emotional hook at the end.

A simple concept, based on solid research, well structured, gracefully executed.

Structured thinking is a competitive advantage

The process of design calls for a combination of investigation, strategic thinking, design excellence and project management skills.

But regardless of the nature of your client and the complexity of their project, the process should remain the same.

By breaking a project down into distinct phases, each with defined beginning and endpoints, you create logical breaks for review and decision making.

Reinventing the process each time in order to cut costs can create substantial risks to the project, and negate any long-term benefits.

Larger firms may follow a controlled and documented process, such as PRINCE2, whilst smaller agencies may have a simple five-stage plan, but in either case having a structured process appropriate to the task provides competitive advantage by:

• assuring that a proven method is being used to achieve business results;
• sharing the understanding of the time/cost/quality required;
• creating trust and confidence in the project team;
• positioning project management as smart, efficient and cost-effective;
• building credibility for the proposed creative solutions; and
• setting and managing expectations for the process.

However it is expressed, the design process can be seen as just a more complex version of the simple ‘story hill’ that is taught in primary school.

You need a beginning, a middle and an end, and within that you need to ask what needs to happen (and in what order) and how are things resolved?

But because the process is just the process, you still need a creative spark, intuition or leap of faith to bring it to life.

Having a structure in place lessens the background ‘noise’ and creates the space in which creative thinking can thrive.

Google Mobile App UX Principles

I do like a good UX framework, and Google’sMobile App UX Principles document uses practical examples to demonstrate how to improve the user experience of apps. The effectiveness of user optimisation strategies are illustrated using metrics such as app performance and user conversion on both Android and iOS platforms.

Adopt, Use, Transact, Return

In designing an app, you need to work hard to meet the expectations of users who are becoming accustomed to high quality apps that deliver usable, robust, and sometimes delightful user experiences.

Investing time and effort in creating, testing and optimising services can have a significant effect on how ‘sticky’ your app becomes.

The basics that need to addressed include optimising conversion, and avoiding interrupting users, or forcing them to think about things that should be simple. Google expresses this as a four-stage ‘Adopt, Use, Transact, Return’ framework.

Adopt, Use, Transact, Return

Adopt - Remove roadblocks to usage  
Remove all roadblocks to usage - and adoption - of your mobile app. Get users into the content / substance as quickly as possible, so that they can use, assess and experience its value to them.

First impressions count, and a splash screen gives you a short but vital window to engage a user in your proposition. But, never make users wait.

Tips / help or an onboarding sequence should only be employed if really necessary - so as not to interrupt users - but when used appropriately at key decision points, tips/help can guide the user in their initial experience and adoption.

Use - Make conversion decisions simple  
Enable people to use your app in the way that suits their needs. A clear structure combined with an excellent search facility using a range of methods, from keyword to product scanning and image search, will help users find what they want quickly and easily, satisfy their needs and drive conversion.

Transact - Provide the ultimate in convenience
Help users progress through each checkout stage with minimal effort, and with sufficient reassurance, to convert without hesitation.

Return - Self service, engagement and delight
Be useful, to engage and delight, in order to retain customers or encourage member loyalty. Because, mobile apps are the most appropriate touchpoint for repeat interactions and frequent transactions, customers and members already loyal to a brand, and mobile first use cases (that couldn’t exist without unique smartphone services leveraging rich and contextual data; etc.), are more likely to return if an app provides an engaging experience.

What not to do

Do not mimic UI elements from other Platforms 
Design for each native mobile platform – Android and iOS - because each has unique capabilities and visual languages

Do not use underlined links 
Avoid using text with underlined links, which are part of the web / browser / page model, and not part of the app / screen model. Apps use buttons, not links.

Do not take users to the browser
Keep users in-app at all times, to maintain their spatial geography and to optimise conversion.

Do not ask users to rate your app too soon after downloading it
Avoid interrupting users by asking them to rate your app if they’ve only recently downloaded it or only used it a few times. Instead, wait until they prove to be repeat users and they’ll be more likely to rate your app favourably and provide more informed feedback

Mobile-friendly

My portfolio website at www.robertlevison.co.uk passes Google's mobile-friendly website test. Yay!

"Mobile friendliness" will affect how prominently websites appear in Google search results pages from 21 April 2015.

A page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:

• Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
• Uses text that is readable without zooming
• Sizes content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom
• Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

Google provides a Mobile Friendly Test developer tool so you can see if your website is mobile-friendly.

The Power of Structure

Creating structure is one of the key tasks for designers, but if we are creators of structure, what sort of structures are we creating?

Architecture influences the way we move through physical space. We create places for reflection and zones for action within perceptual boundaries and physical constraints.

Information architecture performs the same function, creating virtual spaces – patterns - whose purpose is communicated through space, form, colour, image, typography and behaviour.

These structures define entrances and exits to spaces where we engage in actions in both real and virtual worlds. Well-designed spaces and declare their purpose and encourage us to interact, to perform and to create.

The visual structure we build into our designs affects the way people see them. Is our visual hierarchy working so that readers find what they need, and in the right order? Are elements appropriated weighted so that their relationships are clear? Do people gravitate toward the most important information on the page, or are there elements that distract? Can our audience clearly see what to do next?

We begin to nudge the user experience by developing a conceptual structure that describes a consistent visual language. Our primary goal must be clarity. Does this graphic help to illustrate the idea, or make it more confusing? Communicating through words and images influences the way we think about things, and over time, becomes part of our brand.

Social structures influence the way we interact with others and set out the opportunities for social interaction. This area is one that designers have only just begun to investigate. Can you poke people? Favorite something they did? Engage with a brand? How is reputation managed? Are you able to import or export your relationships, and (more importantly) does it make sense to do so?

Of course these structures do not function in isolation. They overlap, intermingle, and co-exist. As designers we need to recognise the most appropriate patterns, and how to use them in our designs.

Build well.

Big design

gov.uk

When the award-winning gov.uk site launched in 2012, it marked the moment ‘big design’ entered the mainstream.

Driven partly by the need to be accessible, and partly by the requirement to work on mobile devices, the launch of gov.uk also coincided with the design industry moving from skeuomorphic design towards the flat aesthetic seen in Microsoft’s Windows 8 ‘Metro’ interface, Apples iOS8 and Google’s Materials Design.

This combination of HTML5 dynamic backgrounds, overlayed with large type and control icons on flat colour panels has created a youthful ‘flat’ UI design meme that references the Bauhaus and Swiss Design schools and provides a single underlying system providing a unified experience across platforms and device sizes.

The new BBC responsive website, now in beta testing, follows the same principles.

BBC Beta

Every week, the BBC News website gets around 115 million visits, and the number coming from mobiles and tablets is increasing all the time to the point that these devices now account for 43% of unique browsers.

Looking at device usage, it seems clear that the increased take up of tablet and mobile devices, with their requirement for larger button target areas, is driving the move towards ‘big design’.

Apple iOS7

For any organisation, maintaining different versions of websites for desktop, tablet and mobile (as well as accounting for different screen sizes, different browsers and legacy systems) is unsustainable. Designing simpler responsive sites, optimised for different screen sizes, is the most efficient structure, but it means that control areas designed for display on mobile devices take up a proportionally larger area of screen when displayed on a desktop device.

Microsoft Metro/Windows8

Google Material Design

This also represents a shift in the way websites are designed. In the early days of the web, websites were merely ‘brochureware’ extensions of printed publications. (The first web page I designed for the DTI just had a telephone number on it.) Then came sites that replicated the (sometimes labyrinthine) internal structure of an organisation. In the third wave these sites were turned around to be more user-centric.

Now we are seeing the rise of more focused task-centric sites, and enabling users to carry out these tasks (often on the move) using a simple graphic UI that stands out from the background visual noise is a major driver in big design.

But in deploying large blocks within your content, the challenge now for a designer is how to develop the visual structure without losing a sense of style.

The resolution of mobile screens means that good typography, tracked and spaced with as much precision as print, is now achievable. Icons and other UI elements don’t need candy stripes or glossy reflections to make them look better at low resolutions.

So while it’s good to know what best-practice is, it’s possible for designers to push the boundaries, because we can.

Investing in design

Design Council research has shown that for every £1 that businesses invest in design, they gain on average over £4 net operating profit, over £20 net turnover and over £5 net exports.

And there is increasingly widespread awareness in industry that when the remit for design is widened beyond the traditional focus on products or graphics to provide benefits such as improved strategic thinking, morale and productivity, then design can add significant value to organisations.

A new report, Leading Business by Design, suggests that rather than being a method solely for creating desirable objects, design can be fundamental to businesses in helping them innovate and define strategy.

The report was commissioned from Warwick Business School by the Design Council, and came up with three main findings;

1. Design is customer-centred – Benefit is greatest when design is intimately related to solving customers’ problems.
2. Design is most powerful when culturally embedded – It works best when it has strong support from senior management in the commissioning organisation, and is integrated into product / service development from beginning to end.
3. Design can add value to any organisation – Design can benefit small, medium or large manufacturing and service-based organisations by driving innovation and opening up uncontested market spaces, differentiating products and services to attract customers, and improving recognition by strengthening branding to embody a company’s values.

Using case studies, the report provides practical examples of how these three design themes have benefited a range of organisations, and provides clear evidence that structured design thinking offers a set of widely applicable principles that can be of huge benefit to all businesses.

Essentially, it suggests that rather than being a method solely for creating desirable objects, design can be fundamental to businesses in helping them innovate and to define strategy.

Less than one second

Paul Butt / Section Design

Structuring and visualising data is a discipline that always appeals to me, so it was with a sense of anticipation that I took a trip to Shoreditch to see a two-day exhibiton of information and data design curated by London based information design agency, Signal Noise.

Signal Noise commissioned a series of print-based data visualisations that explored the theme of “less than one second”, based on the premise that time is of the essence now more than ever before.

We now access enormous reams of data in ‘less than a second’, thanks to technologies such as cameras that captures the movement of light in slow motion, or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that observes sub-atomic activity happening in millionths of a second.

Technology enables a vast number of data points and events to be read and understood across a variety of fields - from automated trades to F1 analytics - but filtering and making sense of the data so that it provides a useful insight is the job of the information graphic designer.

Despite the wide range of subjects used as source material for the exhibition, including athletics, cinematography, F1, GPS, the LHC and stock trading, I found it significant that the base structure of the majority of the visualisations was circular.

Mapping the data - Josh Gowen

The visualisations that eschewed circles were, I thought, less intuitive and less visually attractive, even though timelines are traditionally depicted as, well, a line.

Imposing a clock face metaphor seemed to provide a familiar ‘carrier’ structure for the message, enabling the viewer to quickly interpret the information.

The most successful visualisation seemed to me to be Josh Gowen’s ‘Mapping the data’, combining the clock metaphor with the shape of the LHC and a graphic that showed how the volume of data crunched by the LHC is filtered and then delivered to 151 research centres worldwide.

Telling the story by combining seven pieces of information in one graphic, plus some cool stats. What's not to like?

New structures for corporate reporting

In 2010 the UK government ran a consultation to find out what improvements could be made to non-financial reporting, and in 2011 the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) published Future of narrative reporting where a new structure for annual reports was proposed.

Draft regulations were published in October 2012 and the changes became law on 30 September 2013.

The new format replaces the ‘business review’ with a ‘strategic report’ and UK quoted companies now have to report on:

• their strategy
• their business model
• the number of women employed at different levels in the organisation

The main areas for change are:

• The structure and content of the Strategic Report changes (and no longer forms part of the Director’s Report)
• Changes to Directors’ Report, including Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reporting
• Revised UK Corporate Governance Code disclosures
• Changes to Going Concern statement
• Revised Auditor’s Report
• New remuneration disclosures and voting

The idea behind the changes is to;

• improve the value of information contained within annual reports for investors and UK compliance authorities;
• to make it easier to make comparisons between companies; and
• to increase transparency.

Current best practice in annual report writing is to produce an integrated structure that brings together strategy, the business model, market analysis, governance, management remuneration, risk factors and key performance indicators (KPIs) in an overarching narrative.

But this method of dividing responsibility for the creation and supply of content will become more difficult, as the various elements of the document now need to knit together closer than ever before.

So whilst the new reporting framework from BIS splits the report into four parts (the Strategic Report, The Directors’ Report, the Remuneration Report and the Financial Statements and Notes), in practice, the new reporting structure might look something like this;

Strategy report

• Highlights section
• Mission statement
• At a glance
• Chairman’s statement
• CEO’s statement
• KPI’s
• Risks
• Market landscape
• Sustainability statement

Director’s report

• Governance section
• Renumeration report
• Any other statutory content
• Accounts section

The regulations came into force in October 2013. This means that companies with reporting years ending after October are now expected to prepare their Annual Report in line with the new regulations.

The consequence of this is going to be more intensive work in the run up to publishing your Annual Report; gathering and verifying the content, identifying any gaps and managing your reporting team  in a more active and integrated manner. It may mean a minor tweak to your workflow, or a complete overhaul of your reporting structure, but if you haven’t got your plans in place, maybe now is a good time to get started.

Visualising data III

A Structural Model for Choosing Visualisation Formats
In my previous posts on Visualising Data  and Practical Steps for Good Visualisation, I defined good data visualisation as something that can help researchers and other users to explore datasets and identify patterns, associations and trends, and also to communicate that understanding to others.

There are three different aspects to the way that visualisations can be used to communicate, so the final format of your visualisation should be informed by where it sits in the visualisation space (adapted from work by MacEachren on how people use maps):

• Communication or understanding: Is the visualisation presenting/communicating known information to an audience, or revealing unknown trends?
• Interaction: How is the user able to interact with the visualisation?
• Audience: Is the visualisation intended for public dissemination (eg, to a general audience), or private use (eg, by more technical audience)

After MacEachren (1994)

The diagram above shows these three aspects plotted in a three-dimensional cube, which shows how different types of visualisation can be classified by the way that they are used.

For example, visualisations that lie in the furthest-top-right corner are those that are primarily intended to communicate information to a general audience in a non-interactive way, such as presenting performance data to citizens using printed (or PDF) reports. Visualisations in the lower-bottom-left corner are those that are designed for specialists to actively explore and analyse information, such as using spreadsheet data to identify patterns.

Know who your audience are and what the message is that you want to convey, and design your visualisation accordingly.

Visualising data II

Practical steps for good visualisation
In my previous post on Data Visualisation, I highlighted the four key principles for good visualisation:

• Design for your audience: Think about how to emphasise the key point(s) that you are trying to convey to this audience with this particular visualisation
• Accurately represent the data: The visualisation should show the underlying data without distortion, and avoid common pitfalls that obscure the real information.
• Organise the information: The visualisation should have a clear purpose - communication, exploration, tabulation or decoration.
• Keep it clear: The visualisation should focus on the message(s) for the audience, and all visual clutter kept to a minimum (except where useful to highlight key points).

What does this mean in practical terms? For each principle there are a number of basic steps that can be taken to improve your data visualisation. Some of these are straightforward to implement, for example ensuring that you are not using decorative effects that hide the data. Others require more work, for example testing your visualisation with key audiences.

Design for your audience   

• Test your visualisation with your key audience
• Know when to use dynamic tools, when to use charts, and when to use tables
• Limit the number of categories shown in a visualisation - be selective in what you present in order to emphasise the key message(s)

Accurately represent the data   

• Don’t distort the scale to give undue weight to statistically insignificant data 
• Keep the zero on the axis scale
• For bar-charts, set the base of the bars to zero (not the lowest value)
• Avoid varying the size/area of objects in graphs, except to convey difference in values
• Avoid using line charts where data is only available for a small number of data points

Organise the information

• Bar graphs are good for showing how data changes over time.
• Pie charts are visually simple and easily understood, but can be manipulated to give a false impression.
• Scatter graphs or line graphs are used to investigate the relationship between two variables, providing sufficient data points are available.
• Bubble charts or triangular graphs can be used to show how the relative dominance of one or more factors combined can influence direction of travel.
• Radar or kite charts are good for comparing multiple factors for different options.
• Choropleth/Isopleth maps show areas shaded according to a prearranged key.
• Treemaps display hierarchical (tree-structured) data as a set of nested rectangles.
• Sound and motion can be used to show changes over time, or changes based on dynamic variables.

Keep it clear   

• Avoid using purely decorative effects such as 3D that can hide the data
• When choosing a colour palette, limit the number of colours used and ensure that different colours can be distinguished from each other
• Where colour is needed, use solid blocks of colour and avoid complex fill patterns
• Avoid using strong or bold colours for the background in a visualisation

Visualising data I

Although information design has always been one of the many skills a designer is required to have, the discipline of structuring information is now recognised as a distinct skill set within creative work. Data visualisation, made popular through the Guardian Datablog, is now a central tool in helping people to navigate and explore an increasingly complex data landscape.

Good data visualisation can help researchers and other users to explore datasets and identify patterns, associations and trends, and also to communicate that understanding to others.

Good data visualisations provide an effective representation of the underlying data that illustrates the answer to a particular question. They can inform non-specialist audiences and help decision makers make robust decisions based on the data being presented. Presenting data in this way can support strategic planning, performance monitoring or delivery improvement.

Good data graphics should:

• Make large data sets coherent, and encourage the audience to make comparisons between different data sets
• Reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine detail.
• Avoid distorting what the data has to say
• Present many numbers in a small space - but also emphasise any significant numbers
• Help the audience think about the important message(s) from the data, rather than about methodology

Principles of a good visualisation
Good data visualisation is simply another way to communicate with your audience, and the same principles of good communication design applies to data visualisation as with other ways of communicating;

• Identify your key audience;
• Set out the data accurately;
• Identify the point(s) that you want to make; and
• Create the clearest visualisation that conveys that message, using that dataset to that audience.

Design for your audience   
Think about the message that you are trying to convey to your audience with your visualisation - and focus on emphasising this message. Try not to cram too many key points into the visualisation.

Different audiences may need different visualisations. An appropriate design for a visualisation to be used by researchers exploring how economic indicators vary over time and between places may not be appropriate when showing the same data to non-specialists in order to emphasise key economic trends.

Accurately represent the data   
The visualisation should show the underlying data without distortion. For example, axes should always show zero to avoid exaggerating the importance of differences between data values.

Clear, detailed and thorough labelling should be used. Write out explanations of the data on the graphic itself, and label important events in the data.

Don’t try to do everything with one visualisation.
Organise the information in order to emphasise what you are trying to say to the audience. Don’t bury the key messages in a mass of detail.

Set out key points on the graphic itself, and label any significant or anomalous data events - the graphic should speak for itself.

Keep it clear   
The graphic should focus on the message(s) for the audience, and all visual clutter kept to a minimum. But don’t cut out all visual elements - things that emphasise the key message are useful if they help get your points across to the audience

Reduce and refine. Keep asking yourself whether your visualisation suffers any loss of meaning or impact for the audience if an element is taken out.

The next post looks at some practical steps for good visualisations.

Imaginary customers

Designing a successful user experience requires a clear understanding of your audience –their wants, needs, likes, dislikes and likely behaviours. Put together, this information forms a user profile.

If your project has sufficient time and budget, a range of focus groups composed of people who fit the user profile (and there may be more than one) can be used to inform your initial designs and then test each stage of design development. Insights from focus group testing can be used to refine the design and make sure that it resonates with your target audience.

However, if time and budget are unavailable, even a little audience research goes a long way. One of the simplest and cost-effective ways of gaining insight into your audience is to use an imaginary user profile, or persona, created from desk research, project knowledge and a little common sense.

The level of detail that is required will vary depending on the nature of your project, but creating a relevant persona means that you and your team always have a touchpoint to refer to when designing. This helps make sure that design decisions remain in line with the needs and expectations of your audience.

The idea is to be able to imagine how a particular user will interact with your design. So if your audience has been identified as a young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs), your persona will outline their likely personality attributes, esteem, sense of belonging, security, and physical needs (based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).

• Identify the main audience types by talking to your client and researching their customer base at the start of the project.
• Create a shortlist of attributes including demographics (age, education, gender, location, profession) and psychology (attitude, interests, lifestyle, personality).
• Encourage empathy by giving each persona a name (and a stock photo also helps to bring it to life).
• Share the user profiles with your client and project team.

This fictional user profile represents your audience, and depending on the type of project, you may need three, four or five personas that reflect the range of your audience.

You can now imagine how your personas would interact with a piece of information and use the insight gained to help refine your design and make sure it meets the needs of your audience.

Legibility and readability

Legible type and readable type seem like synonyms, but typographically they are not the same thing.

Legibility refers to the recognition of individual letters and words, whilst readability is the clarity and speed at which content can be read and understood.

The legibility of a typeface is dependent on its design (and perversely some typefaces are deliberately designed to be illegible), whilst readability depends on the skill of the typographer in choosing a typeface and arranging the type well on the page.

One of the more common mistakes designers make is to choose a typeface designed for one purpose and use it for something else for which it is unsuitable. A classic example is the use of the display face Avant Garde as a text font. Equally, you would not use a difficult to read brush script for a fire exit sign where the meaning needs to be read and decoded quickly.

Since the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK in 1995 and the Disability and Equality Act in 2010, typographic design needs to be inclusive of people with a wide range of visual impairments. Making sure that your type is structured to be legible and readable was always a hallmark of good design, but now it is a prerequisite.

In the next two posts I'm going to look at little deeper into some of the issues around the legibility and readability of type.

Creative clusters and innovation

Putting creativity on the map

NESTA research report 2010

NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts - an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative. NESTA invests in early-stage companies, informs policy, and delivers practical programmes that inspire others to solve the big challenges of the future.

Their report into Creative Clusters, published in November 2010 makes interesting reading for both businesses looking to foster creativity within their organisations, as well as policy makers and planners looking at creativity locally and nationally.

The creative industries are a force for innovation at the national, regional and organisational level. At 6.2 per cent of the economy, and growing at twice the rate of other sectors, the economic importance of the creative industries to the UK are proportionately the largest of any in the world. Nurturing high-technology clusters can also be seen as a way of rebalancing the economy away from the construction and financial services sectors.

The UKs creative industries are more innovative than many other high-innovation sectors, providing a disproportionate number of the innovative businesses in most parts of the country. Analysis of the innovation performance of Britain’s creative industries confirms that they punch well above their weight in terms of innovation across almost all regions in the UK.

NESTA took the concept of creative clusters as a starting point to examine the role that creative industries play in local and regional innovation systems.

Industrial clustering benefits businesses by giving them access to skilled staff and shared services, and the opportunity to capture valuable knowledge spillovers.

Creative firms tend to locate close to each other even more than
most other sectors. Advertising and Software firms often cluster near each other; the same is true of Music, Film, Publishing and Radio and TV businesses.

Creative hotspots
London is at the heart of the creative industries in Britain, dominating in almost all creative sectors, and particularly in the most intrinsically creative layers of the value chain for each sector.

The nine other creative hotspots across Britain are Bath, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Guildford, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Wycombe-Slough.

Different cities across Britain have different profiles of creative specialisation: cities across the South present more diversity in their range of creative services, whereas Northern and Midlands cities (Manchester excepted) have similar creative profiles.

However, the mere existence of a creative agglomeration is not enough for the benefits from clustering to emerge. The other crucial ingredient is connectivity between firms within a cluster, with collaborators, business partners and sources of innovation elsewhere (both in the UK and overseas), and finally, with firms in other sectors that can act as clients, and as a source of new and unexpected ideas and knowledge. These three layers of connectivity are underpinned by a dense web of informal interactions and networking.

NESTA’s report identified a range of proactive steps that can be taken to help boost creativity internally, locally and nationally;

Look for latent clusters rather than try to build new ones from scratch
Identify whether there are any latent clusters ‘hidden’ in your locality that would benefit from networking and awareness-raising to develop a dense web of internal and external links.

Think about which sectors work well together
There are important synergies between some creative sectors, but not others. Avoid potentially wasteful ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategies for creative clusters that don’t pay sufficient attention to the distinctive needs of different sectors.

Adopt better targeted, and more realistic strategies that focus on ‘building up and connecting’ those sectors that are already present – and are complementary with each other.

Technological innovation is increasing the potential impacts from the creative industries…
The creative industries do not have a monopoly on creativity, but neither do manufacturing and engineering have a monopoly on technological innovation.

Universities should do more to promote innovation in increasingly tech-intensive creative industries
Technology intensive creative industries, for example, have something to gain from tapping into the public research base in their local universities.

In the context of the creative industries, universities tend to be seen mainly as a source of skilled labour. This contrasts with the technology and science-based sectors, where universities are a crucial source of knowledge for innovation, as well as high-growth spinoffs. It is important to ensure that the local creative industries engage more actively with universities to harness research outputs that might enhance their productivity and innovative performance.

Nurture talent, and give it reasons to stay
The presence of a specialised and knowledge-intensive pool of labour is a key factor in business.

Help remove barriers to collaboration
Even if they are aware of each other, local creative businesses may be keen to protect their valuable ideas or client portfolios and be wary of collaborating for fear of disclosing sensitive information.

Capture creative value locally
The generation of original intellectual property (IP) is at the core of what many creative businesses do. Where they retain ownership over their IP, they have more incentives to innovate to exploit it, generating additional revenues that can be reinvested in growth, and building commercial and collaborative relationships with other local firms.

Build bridges as well as towers
Although investments in iconic public buildings can produce undoubted cultural and economic benefits, building links between potentially collaborative businesses and sectors may produce longer lasting impacts.

East London Tech City as the beginning of a new approach for creative cluster development?
The Prime Minister’s announcement (in November 2010) of the East London Tech City set of initiatives, aimed at building up the vibrant high-tech and digital media cluster in Old Street and Shoreditch is a step in the right direction. Rather than trying to create a new cluster from scratch, East London Tech City aims to take an organic, already competitive cluster to the next level, by providing it with the right infrastructure (both physical and digital), and developing its connections with global companies.

Have you got a strategy?

Strategy is one of those terms that designers love to hate. More often than not because the person hearing it doesn’t understand what it means (and ‘strategy’ only scores 10 points in buzzword bingo).

Whereas tactics are concerned with actively doing something, strategy is all about your plan for actively doing something. The key words here are ‘your plan’.

Launching straight into a piece of design without knowing why you are doing it, or what you are trying to communicate or to whom you are communicating, is, quite frankly, a waste of everybody’s time and effort.

Having a strategy is not a ticklist exercise, but a methodology for getting to where you want to be.

It can take many different forms from a simple who, what, why, where, when and how, through to a more formal PRINCE2 documented process.

The scale and depth depends on the nature of a project – a flyer will not need the same attention to detail as a campaign.

The important thing is to make your strategy work for you so that you have a solid base on which your communication is built. Each element of the framework can then be tested to make sure your design decision-making is evidence-based and sound.

You can then argue that you may not like the solution, but you can’t argue with the solution.

Plan to succeed
Start with a blank sheet of paper, and on it define a structure within which you can construct your design. By creating a pattern of decisions and actions in the present, you can guarantee success in the future.

So before you even think about words and pictures, you need to work your way through your strategy and see how it will influence the design;

• Have you a mission statement (do you know why you are doing this)?
• Do you know what your aims and objectives are (where are you now, where do you want to be and how are you going to get there)?
• What are the characteristics of the brand you are working with?
• What are the communications criteria (segmentation, positioning)?
• Do you have a communication plan (audience, medium, message, schedule, budget)?
• Do you know what the communication channels are?
• What does success look like (and how will you measure it)?

And then there are all those paper tools you can use to help inform your strategy (all with their little acronyms);

• SMART – Specific. Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timebound
• SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
• AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
• PPPP - Product, Price, Place, Promotion

Do you need to use them all? The answer (of course) is that it all depends on the nature of the project, but a partly informed strategy is better than no strategy at all. And as they say in the army, ‘Perfect Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.’