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.

Type talks

We know that typefaces convey emotion as well as information.

Sarah Hyndman’s talk at the Museum of Packaging set out to explore the connections between social change, popular sentiment and typography.

In a time of increased industrialisation and globalisation, where jobs and livelihoods are threatened, where an influx of labour from elsewhere depresses wages, where old certainties are stripped away as financial systems, social order, and country borders are threatened. New leaders articulate a radical vision of the future, whilst those outside of the elite look on powerless and in search of a voice.

Sound familiar?

In 1970 the raw anger of a generation that felt excluded, marginalised and ignored found their voice in Punk. Expressed through attitude, music, style and typography, Punk’s anti-establishment stance found its visual expression through the work of Jamie Reid.

The stylistic conventions of Punk included mixing type styles and weights, overprinting, cluttered pages, deliberate mistakes, cultural references, blurred photography and an embrace of general messiness. All elements that rejected the rules and structure of the international style, took the typographic grids of modernism, a visual shorthand for the corporate industrial complex, and tore them apart.

Treating type as if it was a photograph freed designers from the restrictions of typesetting within a structured grid. Cut-out, photocopied and hand-drawn type also had the advantage of being able to bypass expensive printers, the rawness of the layouts on labels, flyers and zines perfectly matching the urgency and language of the authors.

 Ironically, the vibrancy of the look led to it becoming co-opted by the very establishment that Punk aimed to subvert. First ignored and feared, then embraced and tamed.

Kellog’s Squares anyone?

The creation of an expressive style that symbolises opposition to the establishment has historical precedent, and the inevitable co-option of anti-establishment typography into the mainstream follows a similar pattern. First World War Germany saw the appearance of Dadism. 1960’s America brought us psychedelia and pop art against the backdrop of the Vietnam war. The industrial decline of The UK in the 1970’s gave rise to Punk, whilst the 1980’s brought New wave and the postmodern typographic design of Brody, Saville, 8vo and Tomato (amongst others).

And so to 2016, and the rise of the Snapchat generation. With one typeface, limited tools and only a 10 second viewing window, Snapchat is the latest medium for millennials to share the moments that matter to them. it’s really immediate and ugly. You’re not designing, it’s just Times New Roman or Ariel and then it’s gone. It’s the closest thing now to how Punk looked like then.

Unstructured information and emotion that is explicitly short-lived and self-deleting, so it can’t be filtered, searched, indexed or saved, but provides today's authentic voice.

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.

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

Are Annoyingly Literal Headlines Set In Title Case Optimised For SEO?

You can find them across the web, headlines written for search engines rather than readers.

Online magazines like DesignTaxi and news aggregator sites such as BuzzFeed and Huffinton Post use strangely formulaic headlines, typically including a keyword, a proper noun, a verb, and an adjective whilst avoiding simple connectives. It’s English, but not as we know it. In SEO terms the language is optimised to add ‘value’ to each headline.

But in writing for robots, you just get robotic headlines.

It’s hard to imagine classic newspaper headlines such as the Sun’s 1992 headline ‘GOTCHA’ having the same impact as ‘Royal Navy Stealth Submarine Sinks Argentinian Cruiser in South Atlantic’.

Probably the best (worst?) example is the Daily Mail Online, where the inclusion of multiple keywords in the headline means the headlines have become almost as long as the stories themselves. It's clickbait in its purest form. The logical conclusion of this process is that the headline becomes the story, just a shrieking top-line opinion seeking an instinctive knee-jerk reaction from the comment trolls.

Surely we can write better than this.

The point of SEO is to provide sufficient context for search engines to rank the story as high as possible in the search results, relative to the value of the content.

Whilst search engine algorithms are constantly being tweaked, it’s generally accepted that an editor can improve the page ranking of a story by crafting the relationship between the headline, page title and meta description.

As well as describing the story, the title needs to include a proper name and a likely keyword that the reader might be using in their search (towards the front of the headline if possible). The page title can expand on the headline, for instance using a full name when the headline just uses a shorter, well-known, shorthand (eg. Diana / Diana, Princess of Wales), whilst the meta description can include more detail for the ‘snippet’ displayed underneath the link in the search results. All three elements should aim to match the words that users are likely to use in their search, and these search-optimised keywords should also be included in the opening paragraph of the story.

Thinking more widely about the utility of the headline, fitting it within 156 characters to read fully in the search results makes it easier to circulate on social networks, and including a personal pronoun in the headline also improves the chances of readers sharing your story.

(There are of course other factors in SEO, such as unique links to the story and referring links from the story, but these are not necessarily part of the headline construction).

In 2009, usability expert Jakob Nielsen introduced the concept of writing short, snappy SEO friendly headlines that “…must be absolutely clear when taken out of context” and cited the BBC's website as a best practice example of headline-writing “…offering remarkable headline usability."

Nielsen claimed that BBC headlines have the following characteristics:

• Short, typically 5 words or less
• Information-rich
• Include keywords
• Understandable, even out of context 
• Predictable/match for reader expectations

On the other hand, headlines from viral sites are usually the complete opposite:

• Long, sometimes to the point of being rambling and incoherent
• Emotion-rich
• Few or no keywords
• Typically non-contextual
• Use shock or emotional language

And whilst there is value in using searchable terms, the results can be lost in translation.

The late advertising and copywriting genius, David Ogilvy, said that "On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.”

The point of a headline is to draw the reader into a story that they might not otherwise have read. The skill of the web subeditor is in knowing their audience so well that they can add their editorial tone of voice to the headline, whilst still capturing the imagination of the reader.

And if you can turn your headline into a pun, then so much the better.

The Scottish Sun’s ‘Super Caley go ballistic Celtic are atrocious’ is held up as one of the all time classic newspaper headlines.

And, although no one knew it at the time, it’s SEO friendly.

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?

‘I love Comic Sans’

And so to hear Bruno Maag speak at London Design Week’s Sound and Type lecture in the glamorous environs of the Soho Hotel Screening Room.

His opening statement, that he ‘loves Comic Sans’, drew a predictable hiss of outrage from the designers and typographers in audience, but the point Bruno made is that Comic Sans is completely appropriate for its original purpose, comic book style lettering for speech bubbles in the programs MS Bob and MovieMaker

Comic Sans has a characterful letterform that connects, perfect for supporting letter recognition in early learning (and useful for dyslexics too).

So how do you engage audiences visually and emotionally with your brand? What are the essential elements that make your brand unique? How do you create bespoke tools that set your brand apart?

The challenge presented to branding in the global marketplace is maintaining the brand look and feel across all touchpoints in all markets.

Think ‘international’, and designers reach for their tried and trusted sans serifs, but where’s the emotional connection in the international style?

Remember that the ‘modern’ typeface Helvetica was cut in the 1950’s (itself based on the grotesque faces of the late Victorian 1900’s), putting Helvetica well into middle-age.

Instead, make an informed choice of typeface, one that expresses your brand values and connects visually and emotionally with your audience, a typeface that can be placed right at the heart of your brand.

Global companies, such as HP, see investment in a bespoke typeface as a key part of supporting their brand experience worldwide.

But relying on the Western European character set no longer cuts it. Fonts need to accommodate Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Indian and Thai characters.

Designing a font for the Chinese market means creating 27,500 glyphs alone and can take up to two years.

And that’s before you take into account Hong Kong and Taiwanese Chinese.

Font design is a major investment, but the recognition value that an appropriate font brings to a brand makes it arguably worthwhile.

Just don’t use Comic Sans unless you’re designing a comic.

camelCase

I’m seeing a lot of camelCase word structures at the moment.

camelCase, also known as ‘medial capitals’ in the OED, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the words are joined without spaces.

The practice is known by many other names, the most common of which is Pascal case for upper camel case.

In UpperCamelCase, each element’s initial letter is capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper case – as in ‘BlackRock’, ‘MasterCard’ or ‘PowerPoint’, or left as lower camelCase – as in easyJet’ or ‘iPod’.

An early systematic use of medial capitals is the standard notation for chemical formulae, such as NaCl (Sodium Chloride), that has been widely used since the 19th century.

In the 1970s, medial capitals became an alternative (and often standard) identifier naming convention for several programming languages.

Computer programmers often need to write descriptive (hence multi-word) identifiers, like ‘end of file’ or ‘char table’, in order to improve the readability of their code.

It was only in the late 1960s that the widespread adoption of the ASCII character set made both lower case and the underscore character ‘_’ universally available. Some languages, notably C, promptly adopted underscores as word separators (‘end_of_file’) however, some languages and programmers chose to avoid underscores, among other reasons to prevent confusing them with whitespace, and adopted camel case instead (‘endOfFile’).

One theory for the origin of the camelCase convention holds that C programmers and hackers simply found it more convenient than the standard underscore-based style.

Another account claims that the camelCase style first became popular at Xerox PARC. The PARC Mesa Language Manual (1979) included a coding standard with specific rules for Upper- and lower camelCase that was strictly followed by the Mesa libraries and the Alto operating system.

Since the 1980s, it has become increasingly fashionable in marketing for names of technology products (BlackBerry, YouTube), merged companies (PricewaterhouseCoopers, ExxonMobile, GlaxoSmithkline) and for naming your avatar in online gaming (SpongeBobSquarePants anyone?). However, camelCase is rarely used in formal written English and most style guides recommend against its use.

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.

*Santa*™

Its a bit late for this Christmas, but I came back to find a link to the Santa Brand Book from Quietroom in my inbox.

Ho, ho ho!

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.

Behavioural science

Behavioural science and behavioural economics show us that, very often, we do not behave in ways we would expect to if we were perfectly ‘rational’ human beings. Many of us still have not insulated our lofts, despite the fact that doing so will reduce our energy bills; we very rarely switch our bank accounts, despite the fact that we may benefit from higher saving rates elsewhere; and we may not yet have committed to becoming an organ donor, despite the fact that the majority of us would be willing to do so if asked.

Many of today’s issues have a strong behavioural component. From tackling anti-social behaviour, to education and health – our behaviours as citizens, parents and neighbours significantly affect the quality of our lives and that of others.

We can influence people’s behaviour in a number of different ways. Tough laws can be made, with fines for those who fail to comply with new legislation, or bans can be introduced that prevent people from eating certain types of food or engaging in particular types of activities.

This is where advertising and design can make a difference. We can give citizens more or better information. We can prompt people to make choices that are in line with their underlying motivations. And we can help to encourage social norms around healthier behaviours in ways that avoid inadvertently communicating that the ‘problem behaviour’ – rioting or driving whilst using a mobile phone or dropping litter – is relatively widespread.

And, if we know anything from behavioural science, it is that behaviour is strongly influenced by what we think others are up to.

Governments, businesses and charities are using the behavioural change MINDSPACE framework to support advertising and design decision-making that impacts upon the behaviour of citizens.

M I N D S P A C E
Messenger  – We are heavily influenced by who communicates information
Incentives -– Our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses
Norms – We are strongly influenced by what others do
Defaults – We ‘go with the flow’ of pre-set options
Salience – Our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us
Priming – Our acts are often influenced by subconscious cues
Affect – Our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions
Commitment – We seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts
Ego – We act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves

For example, exercise is strongly affected by our tendency to discount future
gains, such as being fit and feeling good, relative to short-term pains. Turn this
problem around, such as by introducing an immediate pleasure through the fun of
the Stockholm Metro piano stairs (affect and salience). Making the stairs
eye-catching and fun to climb also had a motivating effect, in that once more people started taking the stairs, others tended to follow.

Or by changing the social norm around exercise with the London city bike hire scheme Seeing more people cycle creates a new social norm and visual prompt, encouraging more people to want to cycle.

In most cases, success will not come from a single design intervention. Instead it will come from a combined approach between many partners – local communities, professionals, businesses and citizens themselves.

A key objective is to try out a range of behavioural approaches – to experiment at local level – to find the most effective ways communicating and of ‘nudging’ citizens lifestyles in ways that make it easy for them to adopt 'good' behaviours.

Character archetypes and patterning

Thanks to Dr Janis Wilson from Archetypology for a fascinating presentation at Wednesday’s Language Consultancy Association event, The Archetypology of Brands.

Archetypes are derived from neuroscience, psychology and classical studies. Essentially they are groups of certain personality traits and behaviours that can be recognised, categorised and expressed as a persona.

These personality traits and behaviours are laid down in the subconscious brain as ‘loose patterns’. The power of these loose patterns is that the brain is programmed to respond to stimuli that are a close fit. If your message is a close fit to the pattern, it triggers a response that requires fulfillment. If your brand offers this fulfillment, then the loose pattern is reinforced in a feedback loop that is now conditioned by your brand message.

In simple terms, you can use a structure of 12 classic archetypal characters – Innocent, Regular guy, Caregiver, Explorer, Hero, Outlaw, Lover, Creator, Ruler, Sage, Jester and Magician - to describe both your customers and your brand. In theory, if you know what your brand character is, and whom you want to talk to, adopting the correct tone of voice for a conversation between the two archetypes triggers this patterning and helps you to deliver your message. The key is to use the appropriate language between brand and audience archetypes to trigger the loose patterning in the subconscious.

Where it gets interesting is the knowledge that people move through all 12 archetypes at different life stages (although they will have a preferred archetype that they return to), whilst successful brands tend to stick with the same archetypal character.

Then it gets more complicated.

Each archetype has a number of sub-archetypes, and within these are a number of different, sometimes opposing behaviours.

So character archetypes can have a dark side. When a brand expression loses its way it tends to exhibit these opposing behaviours. This could explain why successful brands, for example, British Airways, BP, Coca-Cola, Gap, sometimes get it so wrong. The message no longer resonates as it disrupts the expected pattern. Returning to their archetypal character normally sees the brand refreshed and revitalised as the fit with the audience archetype loose pattern is restored.

As brand strategists, brand managers and copywriters, you can leverage these patterns to connect with and influence your customers.

Chickens and eggs

An interesting way of describing the relationship between a brand, a campaign and a creative brief courtesy of TBWA London’s Executive Creative Director Dede Laurentino at MediaPro 2011.

Think of a chicken laying an egg.

Think of the chicken being the big idea and an egg being the creative expression of that idea.

A big idea serves a brand in all its expressions, whether they are internally facing (like newsletters or HR policy etc.), or externally facing (like posters, TV, website etc.). A big idea produces any number of eggs for the lifetime of the campaign.

However, a creative brief only addresses one element of the brand, one egg at a time.

But surely for a campaign to work, the same creative expression must apply to all eggs so that everything looks the same?

No.

And I can give you 26 reasons why not.

Think of an alphabet.

There are 26 different letters in the alphabet. In different fonts. In different colours. 26 different creative briefs.

Put them together and they still work to deliver a message. An integrated campaign. On brand.

If the letters are all the same beautifully crafted letter ‘A’, in the same font, in the same colour, then there is consistency. But there is no communication.

So no matter how many different creative treatments are produced, they all need to remain true to the big idea. To the brand.

That is why the big idea is like a chicken.

Allow a chicken to thrive, and you’ll keep getting new eggs.

It’s the chicken that comes first, not the egg.

Designing Simplicity

Making life simpler, easier and less stressful. Aren’t these a big part of what good design can do to help us live well? 

Designing Simplicity was the first in a series of Inspire + Connect evening events organised by the Design Council Challenges team.

The speakers were Sam Hecht, co-founder of Industrial Facility, whose ethos of striving for simplicity has led to more user friendly products, and Dan Thompson, founder of the Empty Shops Network, and the instigator of the recent #riotcleanup efforts in London.

Sam talked about his design process - removing unnecessary layers so that the function of an object is simple and clear. But he also recognised that everything is a product, that every product is part of a system, and that every system exists in an environment.

The design does not stop at the edges of the object, but is an extension of the whole.

Dan is not a designer, but he facilitates activities and change by the simplest means possible. In the case of #riotcleanup, an idea, a mobile phone, a twitter account, a memorable hashtag and a broom.

In the first 24hrs of #riotcleanup, 87,000 twitter followers believed that they could make a difference. The key was simplicity - a straightforward, practical action using basic equipment meant a low barrier to entry.

Both speakers demonstrated that a structured approach to designing simplicity can produce incredibly effective results.

Rhetorical images

Rhetoric is the art of using language for the purpose of persuasion – to effectively convey the ideas of the speaker to their audience.

But how can you structure an image communicate a message?

As a communicator, you can still apply the four classical rhetorical methods (known as tropes) to the way you design with images;

• The presentative image shows
• Metonymy illuminates
• Synecdoche indicates
• Metaphors and similes compare

Presentative images

iPad 2 ad - presentative image

Presentative images are used when you want to show what something looks like, or to highlight certain features. The image is a literal representation of the subject matter.

Raising a presentative image to the rhetorical level requires some imagination. Vehicle images or packshots of computers are a classic example. The skill lies in the arrangement of the various components, choice of the right background, dramatic lighting or coloured gels, use of a wide-angle lens or a low camera angle. A hand holding the object gives an idea of scale. All these methods are ways of bringing the object to life.


Metonomy

Whitehall sign - metonomy image

You can make abstract concepts comprehensible to your audience by using the principle of metonomy. By creating a closeness between an abstract concept and a concrete idea, the latter is made to stand for the former. Examples in rhetorical terms might be the UK government represented by the street sign for Whitehall, or the idea of freedom being represented by an image of the Statue of Liberty.


Synecdoche

Stethoscope - synecdoche image

Rhetorical substitution, synecdoche, indicates something by having the part standing for the whole. For example, a stethoscope image can be used to represent a doctor (or a hospital). As the viewer engages with the image, they create the entire medical profession in their imagination.

Synecdoche is also used to prove that a visual message is relevant to its subject. By placing an object in its natural context, the viewer sees both the part and the whole together, and the message carried by the object is reinforced. For example a stethoscope around the neck of a figure in scrubs suggests a doctor. Because the two parts of the image support each other, the viewer is reassured that the entire message is believable.


Metaphors and similes

Guinnness 'Surfer' ad - similie

To help others to understand your message, you can use comparative language to illustrate, reinforce or clarify your point. Metaphors suggest similarities between things by substitution, for example, stating that something is something, whilst similes suggest something is like something.

For example, advertisers tend to use metaphor or similie in promoting alcoholic drink brands, because the rules on what you can claim for your product are very strict. Using visual metaphor or similie allows sophisticated brand characteristics to be quickly established in the mind of the audience.


In practice
It is possible to use all four tropes for the same topic, depending on your intended message.

For instance Land Rover (for no other reason than I like Land Rovers);

Presentative image shows (the whole)

Metonomy image illuminates
(an aspect of the subject)

Synecdoche image indicates
(by using a part of the whole)

Metaphor and similie compares
(an attribute of the subject)

The sound of 100,000 people chatting

Listening Post

And so to South Kensington where multimedia artist Mark Hansen and sound designer Ben Rubin have created a ‘dynamic portrait of online communication’ at the Science Museum.

Entering a darkened space, you find the work flashing and flickering as texts appear and disappear over grid of over 200 small electronic screens. There are seven ‘scenes’ and at intervals there is darkness and silence before Listening Post enters the next cycle of movement.

The sampled words and phrases are accompanied by ambient mechanical sounds. Combined, the work produces a form of mechanical poetry or music. The result presents a ‘sculpture’ of the ‘content and magnitude’ of online chatter.

"By sampling text from thousands of online forums, Listening Post produces an extraordinary snapshot of the ‘noise’ of the internet, and the viewer/listener gains a great sense of the humanity that sits behind the data. The artwork is world renowned as a masterpiece of electronic and contemporary art and a monument to the ways we find to connect with each other and express our identities online." Curatorial statement

We Feel Fine

Its a similar sort of idea to Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's online project We Feel Fine, featured in the recent V&A Decode exhibition. The work comprises a database of recently posted blog entries that contain the phrase "I feel..." or "I am feeling...". In We Feel Fine, coloured blobs are assigned to emotions and the user is able to aggregate them into six structural concepts. The end result provides a snapshot of the World's feelings that can be interrogated across a range of socio-geographic data.

But whilst Listening Post has an air of industrial dystopian menace it is essentially passive. The ability to interact with the data in We Feel Fine presents a friendlier, more inclusive view of online chat.

Scanpaths

Our eyes don’t read in a continuous steady line, but scan for information and look for patterns in a series of rapid left to right skips and pauses, known as saccadic movement.

In order to read efficiently, you recognise word shapes. As you read, you don’t look at individual characters. Instead your eyes scan the x-heights across the word and your brain compares the shape of the word outline with words in your memory, skipping over unfamiliar wordshapes, but creating comprehension based on the context of the surrounding words.

We do this because reading each individual letter in a word would be too time-consuming. Instead the eye moves and pauses as it looks for familiar patterns along a line of text.

The point where the eye pauses is called a fixation, whilst the regressive movement between points is called a saccade. A sequence of fixations and saccades across a design is called a scanpath. (Generally speaking, the number of fixations and saccades and length of time a reader spends on them indicates the relative readability of a typeface.)

In western society, by habit we start reading top left and finish bottom right, so these two areas of the page assume special significance for placing important information. Dominant fixation points like this are known as ‘hotspots’. Placing important information at these points, for example headlines top left, or calls to action at bottom right, help in the exchange of key information.

Research indicates that the human eye has the tendency to follow the same scanpaths when encountering familiar media, so in this situation a designer can place unexpected details or incongruous imagery in the design to create new hotspots to attract the readers attention.

The practical application of this insight is that careful placement of different content types can help lead the readers eye around a page or screen, create interest and/or understanding and improve the structural hierarchy of the communication.

Structured writing

Be clear what you want your writing to say before you start to write it.

What impression are you trying to create? Are you just giving information, or do you want your readers to do something? Who is your audience? Who will read your writing? Think about these groups, what interests them and what you want to say to them. How do they like to receive and use information? Is the visual impact important to them or not?

Inverted pyramid writing
Most people are taught to write by setting up a proposition, building an argument and coming to a conclusion.

However, this presupposes that your reader has the time to read your content all the way through to the end. However, most people skim and scan text in order to extract the salient points as quickly as possible.

Journalists and web editors recognise that their readership is transient and have adopted the concept of inverted pyramid writing to communicate with a time-poor audience.

This style places the most newsworthy information at the beginning of the story and orders the remaining content based on relative importance.

• Story lead (who, what, why, where, when) > Supporting information > Details

Using this structure enables the viewer to grab the core message quickly. In turn, your design should clearly frame the content and enable skimming and scanning.

Writing for the web
People don’t read websites in the same way as they read books or newspapers. They tend to scan, looking for the information they want, and ignore long documents and large blocks of text. You can make it easier for your users by following a few simple pointers:

• Put the most important information at the top of the page
• Use sub-headings, bullet lists and links, so people can find topics easily
• Use plain English and avoid jargon (remember, you are writing for everyone, including people whose first language may not be English)
• Keep it brief – internet users like short bites of text
• Keep pages short – don’t make people scroll down too far on any page. 
• Use short sentences
• Make sure your content is relevant – do I really need to include this?

Structured content

The organisation of content directly affects our ability to receive a message.

Some people want to know all the details, others just require a general understanding. Structuring information in a way that provides the viewer with multiple levels of understanding is a fundamental principle of communication design.

Will the editorial approach be story, news or feature? Narrative or bullet point? Q&A or monologue?

Understanding the structure of your content, having an overview of the likely sequence of content types and applying the LATCH and AIDA communication models will help you to structure your design.

LATCH and AIDA structural models
There are two standard models for organising content. Created by Richard Wurman, LATCH (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy), identifies five key ways to categorise information and is generally used at the document level. AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), Developed by E St Elmo-Lewis describes the sales process and is a generally used in advertising and at the story level in narrative.

LATCH (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy)

• Location - Structures information based on spatial positioning ie. transport guides, the human body. Use location when physical connections are important to understanding.
• Alphabet - Organises content structure on letter sequence. Use the alphabet when seeking a structure that will be broadly familiar to a diverse audience.
• Time – Chronological frameworks should be used when users need to understand a sequence of events ie. calendars, timelines.
• Category – Group together information with similar features or attributes. Organise data by category when you need to emphasise connections between data sets.
• Hierarchy - Organise information by measure or perceived importance. Use when assigning weight or value to information.

These categories are not mutually exclusive. For instance, a newspaper is divided into different categories; business, sports, arts etc. Within these sections, editors use hierarchy to place stories in order of perceived importance. The obituary section is ordered alphabetically, whilst the sports results are listed chronologically and weather is mapped by location.

AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)

• Attention or awareness must be developed so that the audience is aware of the product or service.
• Interest must be generated so that the audience learns more about the offer.
• Desire must be created, evoking an emotional response.
• Action is then taken.

For example, in a magazine article or advert you grab attention through an engaging image or arresting headline. The copy creates interest in and desire for the product or service. Finally, the call to action prompts the viewer to act.

You can see that the AIDA model can be used most effectively if you fully understand the needs of your customer or end users.