[DESIGN] Dimensions vs. Aesthetics

A friend sent me the link to a page on Design Boom that catalogues great metro rail station designs from around the world. A lot of them look gorgeous, or at least zoomy. But it hit me that the dimensional aspect of design is much more important than the aesthetic aspect (and, of course, the overall "usability" of a system and its stations is more important than anything else). In the long term, once the novelty of beautiful aesthetics (or the glaring ugliness, as the case may be) of a station wears off, I think what's still going to affect us are the overall dimensions. I have to wonder if there isn't a measurable psychological impact at play – if, for example, standard signs of stress don't appear as we enter a cramped space, as compared to positive or zero signals appearing when we enter spaces that are spacious, "legible," etc.

Take, for example, the New York subway system. For the most part, all the tarting up in the world can't make it more pleasant. In New York, you will always feel like a rat fighting your way up and down narrow staircases, scurrying down cramped corridors, and inching along a three-foot-wide segment of platform next to a staircase, all the while trying your best not to bump into people. Even London, with its cramped Underground trains, has wide staircases and sometimes downright grand stations and platforms. In Paris, the entrances are almost ridiculously wide. In these places you feel like you're treated with respect!

Zoomy designs and artwork are icing on the cake. As I look at the photos on Design Boom's page, it's their spaciousness that jumps out at me.

[DESIGN/POLITICS] The RNC's Designs on Obama's Design?

I just logged onto the Republican National Committee’s website. The centerpiece of the homepage is a series of rotating graphics. One of these graphics – the one featuring Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. McCain’s running mate – caught my eye instantly.


Look familiar? Just in case it doesn’t, now look at this:


It’s part of the banner on the Obama campaign website. Compare the fonts, the colors, the poses. Now check this out from the homepage of the Obama campaign website:


In the graphic featuring Gov. Palin the word "from" is italicized, just as is the word "of" above. This is not that unusual a typographical feature, but it's also not that common, and the RNC's use of it is striking.

Similarly, blue is very common among campaigns. Having been proven again and again to be especially appealing to consumers (esp. when compared to red), this is no surprise. But the shade of blue in the Gov. Palin graphic is remarkably close to the one that the Obama campaign uses.

You’d think that the RNC would want to differentiate its design from that of the Obama campaign – that it wouldn’t want anyone to be struck by similarities. What’s going on here?

I have a quick and dirty theory. The Obama campaign’s logo and fonts have been hot topics of blog posts and in the press throughout the past year. Google “obama design” and you get nearly a million pages on the topic (or so it appears). From what I’ve read, the consensus is that the Obama campaign’s graphics – and its control of the visual message – are brilliant; for instance, Newsweek's "Stumper" featured an analysis back in February that included color commentary from Michael Bierut. Could the RNC be trying to get a little of that marketing and design savvy to rub off on it?

[DESIGN] The Visualization of Data

I learned about Many Eyes, the brainchild of scientists at IBM's lab in Cambridge, Mass., from my friend Adam. It's a Web tool that anyone can use to create visualizations of data. As a rabid fan of Edward Tufte (speaker, anti-PowerPoint crusader, and author of several books on the visualization of data, including The Visual Display of Quantitative Information), I had to pass it along.

There are already several visualizations on the site. Here's one that I found quite compelling, because it uses a "network diagram" to depict visually the medal count at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing:


Note: If the graphic does not appear above, it's because Many Eyes is moving databases around. I've had problems signing in and performing other basic tasks – IBM may not have devoted enough server space to Many Eyes.

I think it would be easier to understand if the countries and the sports were better differentiated, and I posted a comment to that effect (I accidentally went down as "Anonymous," which was annoying because anonymous posting is a pet peeve of mine). If you're looking for a specific country, you can select a sport in which you know that country medaled, and all of the countries with medals in the sport light up; you'll then have an easier time of finding the country. (Of course, the same is true the other way around.)

I also think this visualization would be improved if you could find the actual data by rolling over a country or sport; for instance, if you hold the mouse over "Boxing" a pop-up window appears to list the countries that medaled in that sport. But these are minor quibbles, and I'm not even sure if it's possible to make those changes.

I love that you can pull apart different elements to get a better handle on the information. And the interactivity doesn't stop there: this is also a forum, by which IBM accomplishes two things. First, it is better enabled to improve this tool and its subsets through user feedback. Second, IBM provides an additional service to its users: free consultation from the thousands of other users who frequent the site. Many Eyes thereby builds a solid user base.