Information Heroes
A while ago, I stumbled onto Edward Tufte. It was a welcome relief for me, to hear someone argue for three-dimensional design principles in a time when the prevailing currents in web design were toward flat display, and the suppression of things like shading to give depth to a display. I still think that sort of approach to web design is a flat-out bore. I bought Envisioning Information and was really thrilled by the graphics, though I must admit his approach is way outside my skill range in creating graphics. Imagine my surprise when Tufte was nearly demonized in my document design class— everything I had read up to that point was overwhelmingly positive.
Visual language: Global Communication for the 21st Century by Robert Horn is one of the texts for the class. At first glance, I found the book to be really ugly. It uses tons of clip-art images, repetitively. I was not at all upset about the sheer density of the graphics, but rather the downright commonplace nature of the graphic usage. Reflecting on it now, I can see that using “canned” imagery was part of his point. Textually, however, it’s an easy book for me to like— it uses a foundation from linguistics to argue that the combination of text and image is a sort of creole language, with its own syntax and morphology.
Comparing and contrasting the two approaches to information design it seems that both Horn and Tufte want to disrupt the myth of transparency in communication— Tufte uses breathtaking aesthetics, whereas Horn uses sheer density to force a reader to contemplate the surface of the text, rather than just extracting the information behind the text. These approaches stimulate the same sort of oscillation that Richard Lanham’s “at / through” is all about: separate means, same ends. In conversation with Professor Kuralt, it occured to me that it’s also a manifestation of the different heroic types I’ve been trying to resolve. Tufte is nearly Byronic— championing individual artistry— whereas Horn is more of a democratic/communistic hero type. Clip-art is within everyone’s reach. From a theoretical standpoint, though I find him visually repulsive, Horn is a lot easier to defend.
Resisting the mainstream avalanche of canned templates, clip-art, and Microsoft wizards is an assertion of individuality. However, study of the visual effect of the commonplace does seem more productive than just staring in awe at the works of distant artistic “geniuses.” Perhaps the key is some sort of balance between them. It’s nice to have another point of view.
If anyone else is interested in Horne, there is a site at Stanford listing a number of his works:
http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn
I found the discussion on the “traps of formal logic” particularly interesting, but the discussion of the use of graphics to diagram thought was also fascinating.