2.19.2009

Designs of the Year

The Designs of the Year exhibition opened at The Design Museum this week. One of our favourite entries is the credit crunch diagrams designed by Guardian design team, lead by Michael Robinson

"Geometric shapes of proportional sizes show the value of objects past and present or convey the undulating markets in a simple yet clear way. The design team lead by Michael Robinson at the Guardian have consistently covered the financial news using this approach in order to make the information more accessible to a broad readership and convey the information without too much confusion whilst avoiding business terminology.”


Let's just have a closer look at these amazingly well thought out infographics. Click each picture to see the entire news page it came from.





5 comments:

conlmar said...

woww, really amazing stuff [:
i was just doing geometry homework when i saw that X)

Anonymous said...

These “credit crunch diagrams” are really interesting in their depiction of trends in areas that we hear a lot about, but about which we don’t really know many details. The diagram of the salary package spiral is intriguing because all of these people with about the same job title have such varying wages. Coming out of college you really only hear generalizations about where you can end up and what each job title means to your pocketbook. I really like this evaluation and the realism that it sheds on my naïve view of the ‘real world’. The bank diagram is also interesting in its eye-opening decrease. I think it is really interesting how people put all of their trust and money into these organizations about which they know very little. They don’t know the size of their bank in relation to the ‘big dogs’ and they don’t how many funds total the bank is in control of. On the flip side, they don’t know how big it is and therefore how much of their treatment is blanket, across the board, same for everyone and how much it is specific and personal.
The system itself is very clever. Using color gradients as well as size differences follows multiple Gestault principles of 2d design allowing complicated information to become easy to follow to a much larger range of people. Without even knowing the subject information, an outsider can look at these charts and guess the pattern and concept.

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eda said...
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Tom said...

Not sure I'm 100% convinced by the salary spiral - the surface area of the largest one is definitely more than three times the size of the smallest, so it gives a bit of a distorted picture of their relative sizes. Pretty but misleading...