Jonathan Harris is a story teller. In the tradition of the best story tellers he uncovers glimpses of life, and allows you to reconstruct the rest. You can hear him speak about his work at TED Dec 2007 here or here. His now old project We Feel Fine or his more recent The Whale Hunt are beautiful examples of information design. The different ways in which he handles data, whether it is the data points emulating the weather or using metadata to create a timeline, are both engaging and beautiful.

But while inspiring, this is not the most important lesson of his work. The important aspect of his work is the reminder that good information design goes farther than aesthetics and readability. Good information design engages it’s audience with a story.

This blog tends to focus on the online world, not because there is a preference but because it’s the medium that gives us our voice. The longer I spend in the online world the more I am amazed by it’s similarity to the more traditional offline world. Compare the flow diagramming of a way finding system to that of an IAs wire frame and you’ll see this point proven.

Design Work Plan design blog, has a nice article on wayfinding systems. Something that is often overlooked, until your trying to find out where your supposed to be at say an airport (O’Hare anybody?) They give a nice quick set of guidelines and accompany it with plenty of tasty pictures. This conveniently comes out when I am just at the begining of helping to create a new wayfinding system. As an added bonus they include a link to some arrow vectors, so head on over and take a look.

About the Project

Q: What is Project 10¹⁰⁰?

A: Project 10¹⁰⁰ (pronounced “Project 10 to the 100th”) is a call for ideas to change the world, in the hope of helping as many people as possible.

Q: Why is Google doing this?

A: The short answer is that we think helping people is a good thing, and empowering people to help others is an even better thing.Here’s the long answer.

Q: How many ideas are you funding?

A: We have committed $10 million to fund up to five ideas selected by our advisory board.

Q. Why the name 10¹⁰⁰?

A: 10¹⁰⁰ is another way of expressing the number “googol,” a one followed by one hundred zeroes. Our company’s very name expresses our goal of achieving great results through smart technology that starts small and scales dramatically over time to have a tremendous long-term impact. Project 10¹⁰⁰ is a similar attempt to produce those kinds of scalable results by harnessing our users’ insights and creativity. We don’t know what ideas would help the most people. This project’s premise is that maybe you do.

Find the project it here

The See Conference is a conference on information design, from their website: “Our world is growing increasingly complex, dynamic and multi-dimensional. And so is our communication. The see conference is dedicated to new approaches that are being developed in the fields of design, art, architecture, multimedia and economy to confront this complexity and to transform the immense flood of information into useable knowledge.” Additionally they have posted videos from the mot recent conference in April. So head on over and learn something.

It’s a little dated by now, but Smashing Magazine posted a gallery of Data Visualization and Infographics . It is filled with tons of good examples including work from GOOD Magazine and Megan Jaegerman. There is some really brilliant stuff there so take a look and get inspired.