Joel Katz

“Everything is designed,” Katz writes. Things don’t just emerge in final form. Here he explores the visual design of information, from early cartographers who added clutter to fill the blank spaces of no-information, to today’s designers who must sift and simplify enormous quantities of information.

Several years ago, I’d read so many references to Edward Tufte that I finally read him myself -- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a bible of information graphics -- and found him revelatory. I do also remember wishing his hugely substantive book was also “sexy.” Here, the problem is the opposite. The silky pages of Katz’s textbook are beautiful and energetic -- each two-page spread consisting of a few paragraphs of text plus loads of full-color, supporting examples (photos, charts, graphs, maps), and sidebars with related quotations, recommendations for further reading, and links for further exploration on the Internet.

He captions one how-not-to-do-it illustration, “Less than meets the eye,” and complains:
This diagram of a rocket ship does show where important components are located relative to each other, but {…} there is no information about how anything works and virtually no information about what they look like. I remember being frustrated by these so-called diagrams when I was in elementary school.

That’s exactly how I felt about this book -- “paragraphs of text” does not equal “discussion,” and this is less a development of info design theory/practice and more a piling-on of interesting examples to illustrate fragmented topics.

My recommendation: first read Tufte for the theory, then browse this book for the examples.

(Review based on a copy of the book provided by the publisher.)… (mehr)