The central idea behind the updated brand is encapsulated in the phrase “Do right by nature,” highlighting NYBG’s commitment to studying, protecting, learning from, and enjoying nature. It serves as a call to action and recognizes NYBG’s leading role in environmental stewardship.

The new brand voice mirrors the tone and spirit of New York and the Bronx, embodying optimism, empathy, and purpose. It aims to convey NYBG’s enthusiasm for the natural world, promote inclusivity, and demonstrate expertise.

A redesigned logo emphasizes the NYBG abbreviation in a bolder, more contemporary style, blending the essence of New York City with the Garden’s natural beauty. The typography, featured in our 2024 Typography Report, draws inspiration from hand-drawn natural forms, symbolizing confidence and impact.

Curious about the strategy behind the project, I spoke with Jane Boynton, senior creative director, and Ana Camargo, lead strategist of Wolff Olins. NYBG’s CMO, Michael Crowley, also weighed in. Our conversation is below (edited for length and clarity).

With a vision of deepening community connections while expanding environmental action, what specific elements of the brand refresh aim to strengthen local ties while also addressing global environmental concerns?

AC: The former identity, while elegant, had some cues of a “white box gallery” — where maybe not everyone feels welcome, and not everyone feels seen—places where you usually can’t touch the art. The Garden is such a sensory experience. So we wanted to make sure that in the evolution of the brand, we created a platform in which many different audiences could feel welcome, connected, and seen in the brand. Addressing those issues locally helps us tackle them from a global perspective.

We also wanted to reclaim the fact that this is a New York cultural institution and own that with pride. So, as we thought about the tone of voice being more approachable and empathetic, we also wanted it to be deliberate. We wanted it to be a straight shooter, like New Yorkers are, and residents of the Bronx.

We want NYBG to feel like everyone can own it, from the neighbors to the trustees, the board of directors, and the investors. We created the brand to flex according to all those audiences, from the neighbors to the people who visit the Garden physically, the people who visit online, the people who do research connected to the Garden, and the trustees.

The brand refresh includes a new logo that unites the spirit of New York City with the natural beauty of the Garden. How does the new logo, with its references to natural forms, reflect the personality and impact of NYBG?

JB: The old logo already stood for the ongoing impact on preservation the brand was actively doing and its participation within the local community. So we didn’t want to throw those associations away. We’d like to think that we took the previous logo and amplified it.

Our big, beautiful idea for the New York Botanical Garden is this concept of doing right by nature. Unpacking that idea, the ‘do right’ refers to the active state of the organization, the call to action, the study of nature, the protection of it, the enjoyment of it, and the learning from it. That ‘do right’ is expressed through the boldness of the letter forms. They evoke a sense of confidence that speaks to the organization’s impact and leadership. 

The boldness also speaks to nature. Think about when nature is at its best, and it’s thriving, it’s lush, and it’s rich, and it’s full of form. It’s not skinny. That boldness speaks to where we want nature to be in that thriving state. That boldness is also a nod to the spirit and attitude of New York and the Bronx. We are New Yorkers, and our boldness and confidence in that sense of being direct is part of what identifies us.

Bringing all of these things together, we’re hoping the new logo unites that iconic spirit of New York with the natural beauty of the Garden, paired with the active nature of the people behind the organization fighting against climate change and biodiversity loss.

AC: What I also love, of all the things that Jane has already mentioned, is the ‘doing’ – the action – and the ‘by nature’, which has this beautiful idea of side by side with nature. It’s not behind nature. It’s not in front of nature. It’s not that nature is leading, and we need to follow. We wanted to convey a symbiotic relationship. Because I think part of why we’ve gotten into this environmental mess is because humans have forgotten that we are nature.

Doing right’ is everything the Garden does: taking that perspective of the plants and doing right by them, speaking for them, researching them, and bringing their wisdom and intelligence to life.

The photography is from nature’s perspective, ranging from intimate to immersive shots. How does this POV contribute to telling the story of NYBG, and how does it create a more engaging and immersive experience for visitors?

JB: This element in the toolkit was already working hard for the client. The Garden really invests in photography. They have a photographer on staff and an incredible library of stunning images.

So, our task was more about how we can better align the photography moving forward with this idea of ‘do right by nature.’ Photography offers the opportunity to amplify that wonder in nature and its ability to teach, guide, and inspire us

For the style of the photography, we drew on a diverse set of different angles and perspectives, which allowed us to capture more surprising and unexpected views of all the plants, people, and the place. And more specifically, it’s from nature’s angle or perspective. What would nature’s perspective be if we’re embodying ‘do right by nature’? How would a bird see the Garden? We put nature behind the lends to try to capture the spirit and vitality of this wonderful place and how being here can shift all of our perspectives.

AC: This is a really important point. It’s also part of the evolution we considered because if we’re thinking about that shift, to remember that we’re all part of nature, photography that focuses on the plants and the fungi, it’s easy to forget that we’re part of the same system. As Jane said, that was a vital element to bring the people back in to make all those audiences feel seen and part of that environment.

How do you see the updated brand identity actively contributing to and supporting ecological initiatives? How can a strong brand presence influence public perception and participation in sustainability efforts?

AC: Our client was already doing so many amazing things. Our job was to take those actions, enhance them, and amplify them. As we expand the brand to be more empathetic, welcoming, deliberate in how it shows up, proud, and more New York and the Bronx, that platform can strengthen the brand’s presence and put more weight behind it.

Then, NYBG can use that weight behind its sustainability initiatives. We wanted to make sure that more people care about the environment and engage in sustainability initiatives as they’re drawn into the new brand.

Sometimes, when you see brands or NGOs showing up, the discourse focuses on the things that you need to lose for the planet to gain or for the planet to thrive. We wanted to make sure that NYBG communicates in such a way that doesn’t revolve around what any of us has to give up for the planet to continue functioning. It’s about what we can all gain in a more sustainable life, in a more conscious way of being on this planet. We wanted to bring more folks into that conversation through beauty, abundance, and through that lens of what is there for all of us to gain.

What was the most interesting thing you experienced working through this rebrand with the New York Botanical Garden while developing this project?

JB: I represent a lot of the general public in the area in that I didn’t realize there was all this incredible research and rigor behind the organization. I only saw NYBG as a place, as an experience to visit the train or the orchid show. I didn’t realize that behind all of that are these incredible climate and science research efforts. And it’s very inspiring. It’s what makes NYBG unique and different. And to Ana’s point, it is the reason to get people to care. And so that was a big, eye-opening moment when I understood the full breadth of this organization.

AC: So it’s not just a visual transformation by any means. It’s a way to signal to the world all of these amazing things NYBG has been thinking about and putting into practice as an organization and will continue to accelerate over the next few years.

How does the ‘Do right by nature’ idea translate into practical initiatives or programs within the NYBG’s mission and activities?

MC: ‘Do right by nature’ reflects NYBG’s longstanding commitment to plants, fungi, and the natural world. Since our founding in 1891, our mission and activities have centered around three pillars — science, horticulture, and education — that bring plants and people together. We’re helping nature to thrive so that humanity can thrive.

Branching Out, our strategic plan for 2024-2030 includes longstanding NYBG programs and new initiatives to help us achieve five goals, all of which serve people, plants, and the planet. Bronx-centric programs serve our local community through projects such as Bronx Green-Up, which supports hundreds of community gardens, urban farms, and school gardens across the borough, and Bronx Neighbors, which provides free access to our grounds for residents. As a cultural destination in NYC, we help people to find peace and well-being in our natural oasis. Educational programs bring children close to nature from a young age to incubate the environmentalists of tomorrow. And our scientific research programs are re-centered through a lens of environmental action, focusing our diverse efforts around goals addressing the dual climate and biodiversity crisis.

What initiatives is NYBG undertaking to more fully engage with climate and biodiversity crises? How does the new brand inspire public engagement and action towards a sustainable and biodiverse future?

MC: New initiatives include the program for Urban Conservation Strategy, a research and engagement platform that will engage with local and international non-profit and research partners to advance urban resilience and assist decision-makers across New York City— and in cities around the world. The Bronx River Watershed Health & Resilience Program will be a collaboration between our scientists, horticulturists, and local partners to develop local outreach and plant-based strategies to improve our local ecosystem. We will prioritize high-impact research collaborations across various areas where our researchers have expertise, including nature conservation, restoration, and sustainable agriculture. We are committed to pursuing botanical and fungal research with applications that will serve the planet. The new brand foregrounds NYBG Science with its own style treatment, which draws attention to the incredible research conducted by our scientists. Overall, our new positioning as “plant people” creates a more cohesive identity for our entire staff and programs, uniting science, horticulture, and education experts to apply all of our resources to the broader mission of doing right by nature.

The new brand identity is described as an active, bold, and welcoming presence that connects and inspires. How does the brand aim to foster a sense of connection to nature and the NYBG mission among diverse audiences, including current and future generations?

MC: Every aspect of the new brand identity—from the logo to the color palette to the brand voice—was designed to celebrate science and nature and to create a more welcoming and vibrant experience for our guests. The refreshed logo takes inspiration from iconic New York City designers and institutions, but you’ll also find nods to nature hidden within. The logo and our new custom typeface, NY Botanical Gothic, are full of organic shapes and draw inspiration from posters from the environmental movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. We also created a special logo treatment to represent NYBG Science, signifying our scientists’ microscopic view of the plant world.

The colors we use in our new branding are inspired by nature and named after various plants and fungi. Our vibrant color palette is more welcoming and, in combination with the bold typeface, draws visitors in to learn more. It’s a reflection of the biodiversity found on our grounds and represents our diverse city and the borough we call home. After all, the Bronx is NYC’s greenest borough! Our brand reflects the Garden’s 133-year history while looking ahead to a bright and botanical future. NYBG is so many things for so many people – a place of respite in a concrete jungle, a place for cutting-edge scientific research, a place to experience art and culture – and our new brand embraces each of these roles, not just for today, but for the generations of purposeful plant people that follow.

The recently released 2024 PRINT Typography report speaks to an intense balancing act between legacy and future impact of typefaces. This renewed identity for NYBG is evidence of this consideration, with a custom wordmark that is a confident, bold, and impactful embodiment of the organization’s call to action.

*My criteria for choosing my top African American Designers were simple: a) I must love their work, and b) they must be older than I (born in 1966).

I do not intentionally exclude well-deserved and talented younglings. But I wrote this article as a call back to my younger self, to recognize that the path before me was designed Black and beautiful.

Now, read on and shine on.

Charles Dawson (1889 – 1981)

Best known for his illustrated advertisements, Charles Dawson (Charles Clarence Dawson) was an influential Chicago designer and artist through the 1920s and 30s.

He was born in 1898 in Georgia and went on to attend Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. After two years, he left when he became the first African American admitted into the Arts Students League of New York. Dawson abandoned the pervasive racism of the league when he gained acceptance to the Art Institute of Chicago, where, in his own words, their attitude was “entirely free of bias.” During his time there, Dawson was heavily involved and went on to become a founding member of the first Black artists collective in Chicago, The Arts & Letters Collective.

After graduation, he went on to serve in the segregated forces of WWI, where he faced combat in France. He returned to find a changed Chicago: one racially charged due to a slowed economy and trouble finding jobs. In 1922, Dawson began freelancing, producing work for other black entrepreneurs. Five years later, Dawson played a major role in the first exhibition of African American art at his alma mater called Negro In Art Week.

Dawson took part in two different Works Progress Administration programs under Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the National Youth Administration, where he designed the layout for the American Negro Exposition, a piece composed of 20 dioramas showcasing African American history.

He eventually returned to Tuskegee, where he became a curator for the institute’s museum and passed away at the ripe old age of 93 in Pennsylvania. Dawson will always be remembered for his great contributions to African American art, design, and advancement.

Aaron Douglas (1899 – 1979)

Known as a key artist in the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas was a pivotal figure in developing a distinctly African style of art through his blending of Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles with connections to African masks and dances. His illustrations, published in Alan Locke’s anthology, The New Negro Movement, showcased his detachment from European-style arts and evolution into his own style, clearly communicating African heritage.

Douglas graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1922 with a BFA. He then taught high school art before moving to New York two years later to study under German artist Winold Reiss.

He became the most sought-after illustrator for black writers of his time after his covers for Opportunity and The Crisis, dubbed “Afro-Cubanism” by leading art critic Richard Powell. Among his other notable covers and illustrations are his designs for Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and God’s Trombone, James Weldon Johnson’s epic poem.

Douglas was well-versed in Harlem nightlife, where he spent many nights gaining inspiration for his designs and depictions of the black urban scene. His murals, adorning the walls of various institutions, cemented his name as a major artist of the Harlem Renaissance. His best-known work is a series of murals called, Aspects of Negro Life, which Douglas created for the 135th St. branch of the New York Public Library.

He later left New York to become chair of the art department of Fisk University in Nashville, where he resided until his death in 1979.

Leroy Winbush (1915 – 2007)

One week after graduating high school, Winbush left Detroit for Chicago to become a graphic designer. His inspiration and mentors at the time were sign designers on Chicago’s South Side. He began creating signage, flyers, and murals for the Regal Theater, where he rubbed elbows with some of the most famous black musicians of the time.

Winbush then went on to join Goldblatt Department Store’s sign department, where he was the only black employee. In 1945, after years of working for others, Winbush started his own company, Winbush Associates, later Winbush Designs. Here, he landed accounts with various publishing houses, doing layouts for Ebony and Jet, among others. His ambition and charisma eventually helped him gain acceptance as a black designer and entrepreneur.

Later in life, Winbush began teaching visual communications and typography at various Chicago universities. He concurrently mastered the art of scuba diving, a feat that helped him land a position as part of the crew tasked with creating Epcot Center’s coral reef.

Winbush was adamant in his desire to be remembered as a “good designer,” as opposed to a “Black designer,” but was well aware of the influence he could have on the progression of the Black community. He designed a sickle cell anemia exhibit and exhibitions of the Underground Railroad for different Chicago museums to illuminate Black history, past and present, to the public. His accomplishments throughout his lifetime make LeRoy Winbush a notable African American graphic designer worth checking out.

Eugene Winslow (1919 – 2001)

Born in Dayton, Ohio, into a family of seven children, Eugene Winslow’s parents stressed the importance of education and encouraged their children to study the arts. Winslow attended Dillard University, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He then served in WWII as part of the revered Tuskegee Airmen.

After the war, Winslow nurtured his lifelong artistic interest by attending The Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology. Winslow then went on to co-found the Am-Afro Publishing house based out of Chicago, where in 1963, they published Great American Negroes Past and Present with Winslow’s illustrations. That same year, he also designed the seal commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation for the Chicago Exposition. Throughout his career as an artist, designer, businessman, and entrepreneur, Winslow always sought to promote racial integration wherever possible.

Georg Olden (1920 – 1975)

Born in 1920 in Birmingham, Alabama, to the son of an escaped enslaved person and opera-singing mother, Georg Olden was a revolutionary designer who helped pave the way for African Americans in the field of design and the corporate world.

After a brief stint at Virginia State College, Olden dropped out of school to work as a graphic designer for the CIA’s predecessor, The Office of Strategic Services. From there, the connections he made helped him land a position at CBS in 1945 as Head of Network Division of On-Air Promotions. Here, he worked on programs such as Gunsmoke, and I Love Lucy and eventually went on to help create the vote-tallying scoreboard for the first televised Presidential Election in 1952.

Praised in his day and posthumously, Olden appeared multiple times in publications such as Graphis and Ebony. In 1963, he became the first African American to design a postage stamp. His design showcased chains breaking to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. By 1970, he had won seven Clio Awards for creative excellence in advertising and design and eventually won the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) award in 2007. Celebrated for his talent, charm, and business intelligence, Olden was a revolutionary African American graphic designer who made advancements in the industry and for all African Americans.

Thomas Miller (1920 – 2012)

Born in Bristol, Virginia, the grandson of enslaved people, Thomas Miller’s talent, hard work, and ambition helped him become one of the first Black designers to break into mainstream graphic design.

Miller graduated and earned a Bachelor of Education with a focus on the arts in 1941 from Virginia State College. Soon after, he enlisted in the army and served in WWII, achieving the rank of First Sergeant.

After the war, Miller was determined to learn about commercial design. He gained acceptance to The Ray Vogue School of Art in Chicago, where he and fellow student Emmett McBain were the only African Americans besides the janitors.

After graduation, Miller searched for jobs and denied one offer in New York because he worked “behind the screen.” Unwilling to tolerate the company’s overt racism, Miller passed on the offer and eventually joined the progressive Chicago studio Morton Goldsholl Associates. It was here that Miller, as chief designer, worked on high-profile campaigns such as the design for 7-Up in the 1970s. As a supporting member of the design team, he also worked on the Motorola rebranding, the Peace Corps logo, and the Betty Crocker “Chicken Helper” branding, earning accolades for himself and the company.

Miller also freelanced, starting when he served in WWII and continuing through his work with Goldsholl. Through his independent work, Miller was commissioned to create a memorial to the DuSable Museum’s founders. This job resulted in one of his most well-known pieces, the Thomas Miller Mosaics, now featured in the museum’s lobby.

Miller’s hard work, dedication, and artistic talent helped him pave the way for many African-American artists and designers to come.

Emmett McBain (1935 – 2012)

Emmett McBain, born in Chicago in 1935, is lesser known than some other designers I’ve profiled. But McBain made major contributions to the advertising and design world and for all African Americans through his successes in the business world.

Emmett McBain, a true visual thinker and communicator, attended The American Academy of Art and the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he became a talented watercolor artist. Post-graduation, McBain worked for several notable agencies and firms as a designer, art supervisor, and creative consultant before co-founding Burrell McBain Incorporated. This advertising agency, which later became the largest African-American-owned agency in the States, aimed to serve their accounts while gaining the trust and loyalty of the Black community. McBain was key in running the agency, landing valuable accounts, and constantly developing new and fresh ideas. His former partner, Thomas J. Burrell, praised his leadership skills and ability to think outside the box.

McBain left Burrell McBain in 1974 to focus on independent art and design in his Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood, where he later passed away in 2012 at 78.

The University of Illinois at Chicago has a collection featuring his works entitled Emmett McBain Design Papers. You’ll find print ads, record album covers, and transparencies of Billboards, all McBain designed.

Archie Boston (born 1943)

Known for his blatant self-deprecation and humor, Archie Boston was a pioneer in challenging the racism of the 1960s and 70s through his designs and attitude.

One of five children, Boston grew up poor but well aware of the importance of education. In 1961, his artistic talent landed him acceptance to Chouinard Art Institute. While at university, he interned with the advertising agency Carson/Roberts, where he cemented his desire to work in design and eventually returned to the agency years later.

After graduation, he worked at various advertising and design firms before forming Boston & Boston with his older brother, Bradford. It was here that they created provocative pieces showcasing their race, as well as creativity, in pieces such as “Catch a Nigger by The Toe” and by selecting the Jim Crow typeface for their logotype.

For the majority of his career, however, Boston was an educator. He landed a position as a full-time lecturer in the art department at California State University, Long Beach, before creating their design department and eventually becoming head of the visual communications design program. He influenced countless young designers there, inspiring them through his encouragement and standard for excellence.

Emory Douglas (Born 1943)

The former Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas’ career in commercial art has been centered around civil and equal rights propagation from its beginnings.

Douglas’ first exposure to design came when his crimes landed him in the Youth Training School of Ontario, California. Here, he worked in the print shop and learned about typography, illustration, and logo design. Later, Douglas enrolled in commercial art classes at the City College of San Francisco after running into a former counselor from the center who encouraged him to do so

During this time, Douglas became active in the Black Panther Party after being introduced to the founding members, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Douglas offered up his design skills while watching Seale work on the first issue of the party’s paper, The Black Panther. He was well aware of the importance of having illustrations and artwork to help reach the many illiterate members of the communities the party was targeting. Much of his art and illustration for the paper initially focused on Black rights, but it soon expanded to include women, children, and community figures alongside the party’s focuses. While working on The Black Panther, Douglas coined and popularized the term “pigs” in reference to police officers.

In the 1980s, the Black Panther Party, as Douglas had once known it, was mostly dissolved by law enforcement efforts. Later, Douglas moved to care for his ailing mother and continued to pursue some independent design. His revolutionary artwork helped to educate and agitate repressed and suppressed communities of the time.

Sylvia Harris (1953 – 2011)

Noted for her unwavering desire to help others, Sylvia Harris was a graphic designer, teacher, and business owner who used her research and skill set to reach far and wide.

Born and raised in Richmond, VA, Harris experienced the desegregation of the 1960s directly. This experience provided the foundation for her interest in social systems and their effect. After receiving her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Harris moved to Boston, where she worked with various creative types. Through her work with WGBH and Chris Pullman, she realized the design field’s breadth and depth. After much prodding from her mentor, Harris enrolled in Yale’s Masters in Graphic Design program.

Two Twelve Associates was created with two of her former classmates in 1980 after graduation. Here, Harris began to explore how to use and grow her skill set to develop large-scale public information systems. Her work with Citibank set an early precedent for human-centered automated customer service.

In 1994, Harris left Two Twelve to create Sylvia Harris LLC, where she changed gears and began focusing more on design planning and strategies. Harris helped guide some of the largest public institutions, hospitals, and universities with systems planning. As creative director for the US Census Bureau’s Census 2000, Harris’ rebranding efforts helped encourage previously underrepresented citizens to participate.

Harris was awarded the AIGA medal posthumously in 2014, three years after her untimely death at the age of 57. Harris will always be remembered for her contributions to the design field and far beyond.

Art Sims (Born 1954)

From his first foray into the art world with the “Draw Me” test from magazines and TV of the 50s and 60s, Sims excelled. He attended Detroit’s Cass Technical High School, known for its dedication to the arts. From there, Sims gained acceptance to the University of Michigan on a full scholarship. During the summer between his junior and senior years, Sims landed a job with Columbia Records to produce a series of album covers. After graduation, the Sunshine State called his name, and Sims headed to LA.

Sims scored a job with EMI, but he was ultimately let go for pursuing freelance work. He went on to work for CBS, where he continued building his independent portfolio. When he was let go this time, Sims was prepared and already had the office space for his firm, 11:24 Advertising Design.

After seeing one of Spike Lee’s films, Sims knew he had to work with the director. He went on to design posters for Lee’s New Jack City, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, and most controversially, Bamboozled.

Ever the entrepreneur, Sims is developing a greeting card line and writing screenplays while teaching graphic design to African American middle schoolers. Art Sims is the epitome of talent, drive, and ambition, someone every graphic designer should know.

Gail Anderson (Born 1962)

Known for her uncanny ability to create expressive, dynamic typefaces perfectly suited to their subject, Gail Anderson is a designer and teacher with an impressive tenure in the field.

Born and raised in New York, Anderson’s ever-burning curiosity about design began with the teen magazines of her adolescent years. It was cemented while studying at the School of Visual Arts in NY. Here, Anderson began to develop her methodologies and no-holds-barred approach to design.

After college, Anderson eventually landed at The Boston Globe for two years, working with those responsible for pioneering the new newspaper design of the late 1980s. Moving on to Rolling Stone in 1987, Anderson worked seamlessly with AIGA medalist Fred Woodward, where their creative process always included lots of music, low lighting, and late nights. Her work with Woodward was always exploring new and exciting materials and instruments to create Rolling Stone’s eclectic design. They utilized everything from hot metal to bits of twigs to bottle caps to create their vision.

After working her way up from associate to senior art director, Anderson left Rolling Stone in 2002 to join SpotCo, where her focus shifted from design to advertising. At SpotCo, she’s been the designer behind innumerable Broadway and off-Broadway posters, including that of Avenue Q and Eve Ensler’s The Good Body.

Praised as the quintessential collaborator for her inclusive, expressive, and encouraging attitude towards working together, Anderson also admits that many of her “high-octane” designs occurred at night, solo. Whether it’s her collaborative work, solo projects, magazine layouts, or theatrical posters, Anderson designs work with and for her subjects, always emphasizing their highest potential.

The Unknown & Overlooked Designers

They are many, often invisible, but we feel the impact of their work throughout history, and we should acknowledge them. Many African American graphic designers worked behind the scenes and did not receive credit for their work due to the racist norms of the times. 

These include:

• The logo creators for the uniforms of the Negro baseball and basketball leagues;
• Trail-blazing entrepreneurs like Madam C.J. Walker, Annie Malone, Carmen C. Murphy, Mae Reeves, Anthony Overton, Frederick Patterson, and many more;
• The unknown graphic designer who painted the bold and sobering “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY” flag, hung by the NAACP from their New York offices whenever they learned of a hanging;
• Those presently active (Black Lives Matter) are creating banners, posters, signs, and media protesting discrimination of all kinds. Graphic design, after all, is about communicating a message effectively.

The truth of all history cannot be understated. As a designer of the African diaspora (African-Jamaican-Canadian), I believe in knowing those who paved the way. These men and women boldly pushed past racial inequality with their talent and perseverance to help create the way for all.

Glenford Laughton is founder of Toronto-based agency Laughton Creatves, a design studio that believes design is a highly-collaborative endeavor (hence the missing ‘i’). This article was written and researched by Glenford Laughton and originally published on the Laughton Creatves website. Republished with permission of the author.

Sources: AIGA, The Design Observer, The University of Chicago Library, Atlanta Blackstar, The History Makers, Wikipedia, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Design Archive, and The Root.

In this dynamic landscape of digital tax filing, Taxfix has emerged as Europe’s leading mobile tax platform, alleviating people’s fears about taxes and finances while making complex tax systems accessible to everyone. With a proven track record of generating over three billion euros in tax refunds, Taxfix, founded in 2017, has transitioned from a disruptor to a market leader. This evolution prompted the need for a strategic rebranding effort undertaken by Kallan & Co — a Helsinki-based design studio for technology-driven businesses that transforms technology into meaningful brand and product experiences.

As Taxfix experienced exponential growth and strengthened its market presence through strategic acquisitions, including the notable Steuerbot, the company needed to redefine its brand from strategy to expression. Kallan & Co faced crafting a brand that asserted Taxfix’s ambitious leadership position and resonated with existing and potential customers and employees. The goal was to align Taxfix’s brand identity with its multi-product and multi-platform expansion, creating a brand that confidently communicated its mission to the world to build trust and inspire advocacy at every customer interaction point.

II had the opportunity to ask the Kallan & Co team to dig further into their process for Taxfix; Luca Picardi, Lead Strategist & Head of Brand Strategy, and Hannu Koho, Design Director, shared their responses with me below.

(Interview edited for clarity and length.)

The central idea of ‘Fix Finance for All’ is powerful. How did Kallan&Co ensure that the concept translated across the visual, verbal, and experiential elements of the Taxfix brand? Any specific design or communication strategies that played a crucial role?

Luca Picardi: At its core, ‘Fix Finance for All’ is an all-encompassing idea that drives everything Taxfix. This spirit informs the company’s culture and behaviour — reinforcing its role in the world to make the complex and messy financial world more accessible and approachable to anyone. Fixing taxes is just the start of their journey.

The primary creative challenge was to capture the invigorating feeling and benefit of customer empowerment that Taxfix provides while balancing it with the calm and credible reassurance of its financial expertise. The goal was to create a brand capable of being precise and pragmatic during taxing times and celebratory during customers’ more rewarding moments. This duality runs throughout the brand, from the tone of voice and photography to colour and typography.

With Taxfix evolving into a multi-product and multi-platform company, how did the design team address the challenge of maintaining a cohesive brand identity across different products and platforms while allowing room for individuality?

Luca Picardi: Taxfix’s expansion into a multi-product and multi-platform company is an ongoing and evolving process, with a long-term trajectory still unfolding. Numerous decisions are pending, and its final direction is yet to be determined.

We were at the beginning of this fast-changing journey during our project. We explored various brand architecture models to swiftly test scenarios within the Taxfix ecosystem. We simulated future products’ potential look and feel, experimenting with different colour schemes and fine-tuning visual elements. Each iteration allowed us to assess how individual products could maintain a distinct identity while remaining seamlessly integrated into the overarching Taxfix brand.

This future-proofing process helped define a really comprehensive and cohesive final brand system in everything from an extensive standardised colour palette range to a deeply responsive typeface choice that works hard in any and all marketing or product contexts.

The emphasis on simplicity, expertise, and user empowerment is evident in Taxfix’s rebrand. Can you share examples of design choices or elements you specifically incorporated to convey these brand values to users?

Hannu Koho: Each brand element was carefully selected to embrace varying levels of simplicity, expertise, and user empowerment. Our creative process began with the key signature financial motifs that served a dual purpose. These symbols provided diverse communication possibilities to simplify and guide people’s financial journeys, encompassing everything from taxes to savings; they also functioned as cropping devices, placing customers at the literal centre stage of the brand. All of this underpins a central value of Taxfix – making finance fit people, not the other way around.

The chosen typeface, ABC ROM, strikes a perfect balance of sturdy precision and expertise while retaining unique quirks and humane characteristics. It became a crucial tool in building customer confidence through the ‘Taxfix voice,’ which is approachable and expert. Additionally, ROM effectively addressed specific challenges in the German market, Taxfix’s largest, by accommodating the lengthy nature of German words, particularly in tax-related content. The diverse widths proved invaluable for clear communication, whether in prominent headlines on marketing billboards or detailed body copy within the app. When it comes to taxes, the fine print matters.

Colour emerged as another crucial element in conveying the brand’s values. We refined a warmer range of green shades — from more vivid to muted and darker tones. Our aim was to keep the ‘green thread’ from the original brand but embed it with more versatility, meaning, and, importantly, energy. To breathe more life into the brand beyond green, we introduced a set of secondary colours, enabling Taxfix the flexibility to speak to different mindsets, emotions, and needs. The palette was inspired by the various colours of the Euro cash notes, given Taxfix’s European roots, with its key markets currently in Germany, Italy, and Spain. These include hues of lilac, gold, and blue. Each colour adds a unique dimension to the brand — communicating everything from calmness and credibility to confidence.

Considering Taxfix’s commitment to putting customers center-stage, how did the design team ensure that the rebrand resonates with the diverse needs and preferences of the user base? Were there any user-centric design principles adopted during the process?

Luca Picardi: Many companies claim they’re all about their customers but fall short in practice. Taxfix, however, truly lives up to its commitment. Right from the initial pitch meeting to every subsequent project session, the customer consistently came first, serving as the guiding principle of our conversations and the structural foundation of the entire project process.

This customer-skewed approach lived through every aspect of our work, from the comprehensive customer research provided by Taxfix to the proactive customer testing embedded at various stages of our branding project. We ran customer testing for two of our brand prototype concepts and, eventually, the final concept, involving thousands of customers. These testing phases emerged as critical milestones, ensuring that our decision-making process wasn’t confined solely to internal perspectives but was also influenced by the external world.

This highly collaborative approach with end-users played a large role in refining our understanding of their needs and preferences, ultimately shaping a brand that resonates authentically with its audience.

With Kallan & Co’s strategic rebranding efforts, Taxfix has successfully evolved into a multi-product and multi-platform company, solidifying its position as Europe’s go-to digital tax platform. The new brand identity, centered around ‘Fix Finance for All,’ reflects Taxfix’s commitment to customer empowerment and sets the stage for continued growth and innovation in the financial technology space.

To maximize the impact of the new identity, Repslabel orchestrated a comprehensive campaign that works across various elements, including digital publications and promotions. The conceptual campaign pays homage to Baroque composers, utilizing graffiti to shroud their identities in secrecy, infusing Les Boréades with an enigmatic quality that focuses squarely on the music itself. This strategic approach enhances the ensemble’s artistic presence and showcases the adaptability and creativity embedded in their revitalized visual branding.

The newly crafted identity is flexible and designed to adapt seamlessly across various media over time. The typographic approach carries a distinct personality, communicating information with clarity and impact. The grid structure provides versatility, accommodating different visual and typographic elements based on the integrated content. A simple yet powerful color palette adds sophistication and allows for harmonization with diverse graphic styles.

Repslabel’s ‘Go for Baroque’ approach, combining contemporary graffiti in contrast with the highly ornate and elaborate style of Baroque, is music to my ears.

BREAD, a free, limited-edition zine, uses design to tell stories and educate readers in a relatable and accessible way. As a brand extension for Cash App, the zine bridges financial literacy and culture, using design and storytelling to make complex financial concepts more accessible and engaging. The inaugural issue focuses on Bitcoin, offering readers a fresh, inclusive perspective on the digital currency.

Cash App’s vision for BREAD extends beyond just information sharing; it aims to transform how people perceive financial education. In a world where discussions about money can be daunting or exclusive, BREAD seeks to make learning about finances more accessible and enjoyable for everyone.

What sets BREAD apart is the collaborative effort of influential artists, designers, and writers, including Allison P. Davis, Richard Turley, and DAISUKE. Their diverse contributions explore various topics, from Bitcoin mining to rebranding the cryptocurrency and unveiling the enigma surrounding its creator.

The BREAD Bitcoin Issue is available in select stores across major US cities. Readers can also access the zine online to order a free print copy.

BREAD Contributor Highlights:

Writers: Allison P Davis, Collier Meyerson, Emilia Petrarca, Margaret Rhodes, Elise Craig

Designers & Illustrations: DAISUKE, Richard Turley, Porto Rocha, FRKO, Cevallos Bros, Stephanie Specht, Steven Montinar

Raul Lopez (LUAR Founder) 

Benjamin Benus’ book about the book—Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury—is an essential text for every graphic designer involved (or not) with UX/UI and information strategy.

At what point did you become aware of this material?
I came to Bayer’s atlas by way of Isotype—the approach to visual education that originated in the 1920s at the Social and Economic Museum in Vienna, under the direction of the social scientist Otto Neurath. I had written a doctoral dissertation about the artists who’d worked with Neurath during this period to develop this approach to information design (known then as the “Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics”). While researching the topic, I became curious about the many designers outside Neurath’s core team who, beginning in the ’30s, adopted aspects of the Isotype method in their own work. The list includes some widely recognized figures: El Lissitzky, Willem Sandberg and Ladislav Sutnar, among others. At some point while gathering examples of their Isotype-inspired publications and exhibition designs, I stumbled upon Bayer’s incredible 1953 atlas and immediately wanted to know more about it.

How did your study of Bayer evolve?
Initially, I had envisioned a study that would be broader in scope—a kind of survey of Isotype-inspired publications produced between the ’30s through the ’60s, with a single chapter devoted to Bayer’s atlas. But once I started researching the atlas, I realized I would need more than a chapter to provide a meaningful account of the work. In part, this had to do with the massive amount of related documentation that’s been preserved in various archival collections, which offers a fascinating and unusually detailed picture of the atlas’s creation and reception. This abundance of historical evidence is largely a result of the creators being so geographically dispersed: Bayer and his team produced the book’s artwork in Aspen, CO; Container Corporation of America (the packaging company that commissioned and privately published the atlas) was based in Chicago, as was Rand McNally, one of the project’s collaborating printers; a second cartographic printer was in Novara, Italy. This long-distance collaboration meant that people couldn’t just speak with each other in person or by phone but had to rely on written correspondence to discuss even the smallest details. The result is that we have a play-by-play record of the atlas’s production, with some really illuminating insights into the thinking and decisions that shaped the finished work.

Although you show a lot of early work, were you truly aware of what Bayer was capable of doing?
For a long time, I’d associated Bayer mainly with his typographic work at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s. I suspect this is typical for people who (like me) were trained as art historians. The Bauhaus was one of the few historical episodes I remember from undergraduate art history courses and survey textbooks where “applied” arts like graphic design were consistently covered alongside developments in the fine arts. But those art-historical accounts typically shifted back to emphasizing painting and sculpture with surrealism in the ’30s, and abstract expressionism in the ’40s and ’50s. So, I knew little about the later careers of avant-garde artists from the interwar years like Bayer, who continued to work across the “fine” and “applied” arts well into the postwar period. It was only later, while researching my dissertation, that I began to appreciate how the “Bauhaus idea” continued to generate new and important developments long after the school’s closure in 1933. I was also surprised to learn that Bayer (at least from the later 1930s) identified principally as a painter—and that he found opportunities in painting to develop many of the ideas and techniques that he later incorporated in his commissioned design work. The distinctive arrows and cloud forms, for example, that figure so prominently in the atlas’ charts and diagrams, appear first in Bayer’s paintings of the 1940s. One of the real discoveries for me was the reciprocal relationship between Bayer’s independent and commissioned work.

What significance does the atlas have for you? Was it the design? The content? The method, learned at the Bauhaus, that information could be managed in such a remarkable manner?
It was the design that initially drew me in—the atlas’ dramatic opening spreads, the dynamic page layouts, the intriguing mix of playfully arranged found images and carefully drafted charts and diagrams. But as I spent more time with the atlas, I was increasingly impressed by the work’s educational concept, and Bayer’s ambitious vision for it. Beyond serving as a conventional reference work, Bayer hoped that the atlas would serve to cultivate critical map-reading skills, empowering readers to reflect on the roles that cartographers and designers play in shaping and mediating geographical knowledge. He often tried to achieve this by presenting the same information in multiple ways on the same page (showing population data, for example, through maps, rows of countable pictograms and area diagrams), highlighting the advantages as well as the limits of different presentation methods.

What was Bayer’s role in the conception and production of the book? Why did he see the need?
In his role as editor and designer, Bayer participated in nearly every aspect of the volume’s production; but it was also the outcome of a collaborative effort and a complex division of labor. In the project’s first phase, from 1947–1949, Bayer worked closely with CCA art director Egbert Jacobson to develop the atlas’ outline. From 1949, Bayer had assistance from graphic designers Henry Gardiner, Masato Nakagawa and Martin Rosenzweig. Together they drafted all the illustrations, diagrams and supplemental maps, while two cartographic publishers (Rand McNally and the Istituto Geografico De Agostini) provided the atlas’ larger topographic maps. For the atlas’ scientific content, Bayer consulted with a long list of experts, who directed him to the latest scholarship and reference works. He also adapted and redesigned illustrations from existing works of popular science (which are inconsistently credited). But decisions about what to include, how to combine material and how to structure the atlas’ narrative sequence—these all reflect Bayer’s vision.

Your second question—about why Bayer saw the need for the atlas—is an interesting one. Because, to some extent, it seems like Bayer was unnecessarily reinventing the wheel with this project. For CCA, the atlas’ publisher, the work was initially conceived as an update to an earlier atlas—also beautifully designed, but more conventional in its concept—which the company had distributed as a gift to its customers in 1936. It was Bayer’s idea to expand the publication’s scope to address a wider range of subjects (astronomy, meteorology, climate, demographics, etc.). And the work’s emphasis on informing and educating also comes from Bayer.

I can’t help but think that this educational impulse derives in part from a growing unease and discomfort with some of the work he’d produced earlier in his career. I’m referring not only to the propaganda work he produced for the National Socialists after they seized power in Germany in 1933, but also some of the work he undertook as an art director for advertising agencies after his immigration to the U.S. in 1938. In his later statements of the 1950s and ’60s, in which he frequently referenced the social roles and responsibilities of graphic designers, he drew clear distinctions between what he saw as communication that serves to inform, and that which manipulates. He conceived of the atlas as serving the former function.

How much of Bayer can be found in this project?
This is another fascinating question—and one that I spent a lot of time trying to answer in my book—because so much of the atlas’ content appears to derive from elsewhere. The full-page maps came from cartographic printers; many of the charts and diagrams are based on material in existing scientific reference works; most of the pictorial illustrations have the character of found images (state seals, postage stamps, etc.). Bayer’s personal voice comes through in certain passages—particularly in the atlas’ meteorological illustrations, where his distinctive hand is evident in the drawing of cloud forms and directional arrows. But his voice is also arguably present in the collage-type method by which he fused together and arranged all the disparate material into a visual unity. Moreover, the atlas’ emphasis on environmental challenges—ecological crises, for example, created by overpopulation and the depletion of natural resources—were issues about which Bayer had become increasingly concerned and thought important to include.

I am impressed by your organization principles—introducing Bayer’s entire oeuvre, while continuing to focus on the atlas. Were there other iterations of organization that you tried or considered?
I’m glad to hear that you think this organization works. This aspect of the project was exceptionally challenging because I feel like the atlas occupies a place at the confluence of several related stories—Bayer’s own artistic career and his longstanding interest in geographic themes; Container Corporation’s promotion of modernist art and design; earlier and contemporaneous developments in visual education that shaped Bayer’s approach to information design; and the broader history of atlas design, on which Bayer drew and reacted against. It was hard to know which story to try to tell first. I began one of the earlier drafts by discussing Container Corporation’s commission of the atlas and the various functions it served for the company, and only addressed Bayer’s broader career after that. It was only after several attempts that I arrived at the current iteration, which follows a narrative arc from Bayer’s artistic investment in geography and related fields, to the larger history of ideas that shaped Bayer’s approach to the subject matter, to the story of its reception and what it meant to readers at the time of its publication.

In your prologue, you discuss the publication’s relevance today—and you’re right—but can you point to a few ways that the volume continues to serve functional purposes?
For certain types of information that were already well-established before midcentury and perhaps haven’t been too dramatically revised since then—the succession of geological periods, for example—the atlas’ visualizations can still effectively instruct. But like most historical scientific publications, its relevance as a reference work has diminished as the science has changed and the data has become outdated. Still, I see its educational concept—and the ambitious vision it advanced—as continuing to serve functional purposes in a couple ways: I think the atlas suggests a model for cultivating certain forms of information literacy by presenting data (land elevations and ocean depths, for example) in multiple formats at once. This approach not only provides readers with a richer and multidimensional picture of the information but also encourages readers to consider the graphic means used in the presentations—and to reflect on those presentations’ strengths and limits. I also think the atlas suggests a vision for collaboration between designers and experts in other fields, in which designers—to the extent possible and reasonable—might acquire a relatively sophisticated understanding of the material they are tasked with communicating. By the same token, its example invites experts to consider additional ways that designers can assist them in reaching wider audiences. This is an ideal, perhaps, with all kinds of logistical obstacles, but I think Bayer’s pursuit of this vision—even if he didn’t quite achieve it—should be inspirational.

Not being a statistician or dataviz expert (although I do like quoting comparative data sets that can be used to prove my claims that the modern world is going to hell in a handbasket), I asked Holmes if he would select a handful of his favorite entries in his veritable data-memoir. (The only thing possibly more enjoyable than Joyful Graphics would be to read a memoir comprised entirely of data visualizations. Think about it.) Holmes readily agreed to this invitation, and the result is a self-portrait of how information (even when complex) can bring joy into the receiver’s (and definitely the designer’s) lives.

Bring on the joy, Nigel.

Pages 12–13

“Although Taylor and Francis are academic publishers, they and my editor on this project, Alberto Cairo, agreed that I wouldn’t write a textbook for them. In fact, they encouraged me to include personal anecdotes about influences and so on, and I was happy to show the work of my great Uncle George—the only person with any ‘art’ in the family. Part of his output was immaculately drawn side views and plans of the many different fishing boats that worked off the English coast in the early 20th century.

“In 1969, Brian Haynes, the art director of the magazine that was part of the Observer (a Sunday newspaper in London), asked me to draw the same fleet for an article they were doing. Unknown to him at the time, Brian gave me Uncle George’s as a reference for the job.”

Pages 16–17

“For a book with Joyful in the title, I thought I should include some of the books and TV and radio shows that made me happy. (And still do.) Who could resist that Barnett Freedman cover for Lear’s Book of Nonsense? And Good News chocolates? That box was one of my first introductions to infographics. Take that, Forrest Gump! In England we always knew what we were gonna get. What’s more, the names of the chocolates are the lyrics for George Harrison’s Savoy Truffle. (Have to say I didn’t know that when I was eating a Montelimar, a Creeeeem Tangerine, and a Pineapple Treat.)”

Pages 42–43

“Showing stuff in context is a key part of information graphics. (You understand something better when you see it next to something you already know.) How much bigger than a million is a billion or a trillion? If you had a million dollars in $100 bills, you could pack it into an overnight bag. For a billion you’d need an 8.5-foot cube. A trillion dollars in $100 bills would fill up the whole of the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal in New York City. I’m trying to help people understand these huge numbers that are flung around with reckless abandon.”

Pages 74–75

“David Driver was the art director of the Radio Times (the official BBC program magazine), and he was great at putting artists together to work jointly on articles about news stories that the BBC was covering. For this 1975 spread from the magazine, about the Apollo-Soyuz hook-up in space, Peter Brookes did the astronauts, and I did the capsules and docking station. Peter is currently the editorial cartoonist for the Times (of London), where his incisive and funny political cartoons are drawn in a totally different style.

“Just like Time magazine when I first went there in 1978, the Radio Times had a limited number of color pages in each issue, and they were sent to the printer several days in advance of the black-and-white ones. Somehow it all worked out.”

Pages 170–171

“I did a monthly ‘how it works’ diagram for USAir’s in-flight magazine Attaché (beautifully designed by Holly Holliday). This one from 2000 was one of my favorites, and it includes something that I do often: a sort of Greek chorus of little people making comments about the graphic they are in. In this case, they were on the side of the reader, who generally didn’t need a manual for how their car engine works when they are waiting for the plane to take off while squeezed into a (probably) uncomfortable seat. They just needed something simple.”

Pages 188–189

“Bits and pieces that I couldn’t find a [thematic] place for in the book are in the appendix. (All good books should have one!) But there are implicit lessons; here, simplification works well in graphics and toys.

“Ladislav Sutnar, a great information designer, made exquisite, and wonderfully simple, wooden toys.

“I gave myself permission to include a linocut that I made of a beautiful little cat that belonged to a neighbor but who came to visit me and sit on my keyboard most days.

“See the white ‘8’ in the arrangement of diamonds? It’s like the white arrow between the ‘e’ and the ‘x’ in the FedEx logo. I get joy from that kind of thing.”

Dataviz is even more important than ever in harvesting information—separating the wheat from the chaff and keeping the … well, you know.

Order or subscribe here.

It has been six months since your first issue of Nightingale. How’s it going?
Great! We’ve published a ton of great digital articles, doubled our subscribers (don’t worry, we’re still tiny), and we’re just super excited about the latest issue, which is all about inspiration!

Is data visualization still as open to innovation as it has been over the past 10 years? Or have designs come full circle back to “it looks nice”?
We’ve been talking about this in the dataviz community a lot lately. Data continues to be incredibly important in our lives, but what value does it have if no one pays attention? That’s why the design of dataviz becomes so important. While Nightingale has been promoting dataviz with a design edge, we also emphasize the fundamental importance of being true to the data and the audience it is intended for. 

I’d also argue that the design of dataviz isn’t returning to a design sensibility from a decade ago, but rather embodying design concepts that may have been too difficult to achieve technically before now.

What are the stories and themes that you find most engaging for designers and data specialists?
This issue is about inspiration, and our editors started asking questions about how to quantify, track and evaluate it. What is the true value of dataviz if not to inspire others? We want to understand the data of inspiration beyond mere social media metrics.  

Have you found the cure yet for misinformation?
I think many of us working in dataviz feel like we’re part of the solution—or at least trying to be! This goes back to always being true to the data and the needs of your audience.

Kids have to be taught data as language (e.g., reading, writing, arithmetic = data). Is that the reason you produce a section for kids?
The fact that we culturally diminish mathematics is just kind of lame. Lots of kids naturally collect or organize their toys and like to think about how to categorize things. At Nightingale, we think that giving kids a new angle into understanding all of the information around them as “data” can empower them to think about math differently. Data science, analytics, visualization—these fields aren’t going anywhere, and we want kids to understand that there are a million—fun—ways to work with data.

Incidentally, do you think dataviz should be taught in elementary school? Get ’em while they’re young, I say!
Totally! 

The series’ first volumes feature three surprise heroes: Étienne-Jules Marey, who changed not only science, but cinema and art too; his poetic book La Méthode Graphique raised the standard of the data viz form. Florence Nightingale, not simply (if such a thing can be called simple) a legendary battlefield nurse, but a keen statistician whose colorful diagrams helped persuade royals and generals to adopt reforms. And Emma Willard, whose inventions defined chronology for millions of Americans through her maps of history.

The series is skillfully designed by Lorenzo Fanton, making vintage material seem timeless—and it is a must-have collection for information framers and users.

In this interview Andrews discusses how and why he selected these three subjects, the impact of their work in the world of data collection, and what’s ahead for the indie press.

This series is a tour de force. First, how did the concept for it evolve?
The concept is rooted in my excitement for print information graphics. As a working information designer, I look to old charts to see how my professional ancestors solved information problems. Even better, their solutions are often beautiful, too. As my friend David Rumsey would say: They make my brain happy.

We are in a special moment for information graphics. The public is thirsty for ways to better navigate confusing phenomena—from elections to outbreaks. Media obliges, assisted by an explosion of data and ever-blossoming field of digital tools.

A crop of colorful coffee-table books on information graphics was published across the last decade by a bunch of my peers. They told me that we are ready to take it to the next level: It is time to celebrate and scrutinize data graphics in the same way that other fields enjoy—fields like fine art, sports, science, and military history.

There are information graphic masterpieces and it’s time they command the attention they deserve.

To do that we needed deeper research, better photography and more beautiful books. Critically, we needed to write more than simple short captions. We needed to expand beyond the captions of coffee table books. We needed rich essays that go beyond the what to explain the who, why, and how, too.

I’m obsessed with craft. To me, the most fascinating thing is to understand the story behind how something came to be.

With all this energy and glee I was lucky enough to meet designer Lorenzo Fanton. I seduced him to the concept, and his brilliant work helped translate my ideas and enthusiasm to book. He is particularly responsible for creating our series’ cover system and the interiors’ duotone/four-color split. In the first half of each volume, duotone creates a coherent mass and elevates the text. In the latter half of each volume, the text becomes secondary in its support of the four-color graphics.

Then, a cast of expert contributors—the No. 1 authorities on these subjects—joined the project, too. Without editor Susan Schulten, for example, it would be impossible to produce a book on Emma Willard. I wouldn’t have tried.

Finally, many readers believed in the project and committed their funds to help make production possible.

Design and production took years. But that afforded us the time to source all of the rare archival materials from dozens of libraries around the world.

I had never heard of Emma Willard or Étienne-Jules Marey before. And Florence Nightingale was merely a legendary historical figure. Why are they your first three subjects?
Yes, each story is curiously absent from public knowledge—a function twists of history. Emma Willard’s spectacular early American graphics were (sometimes literally) lost in the wake of the Civil War and early modernity. Florence Nightingale published her persuasive diagrams anonymously. She let her famous nursing image outshine her other work. Her entire graphics story was buried in manuscript archives. Étienne-Jules Marey has been the go-to reference for insiders like me for a century. But only to insiders, because his Graphic Method has never been translated to English.

These are the three stories that deserve to be told more than any other. They each offered large gaps between the Visionary’s stunning contributions, and modern appreciation for them.

Most new ventures fail. I chose these three not knowing if I would get to do more volumes. These first three were the ones I wanted most.

What in each life was the epic or iconic work?
Emma Willard’s Temple of Time, a stunning visual metaphor for the blind march of history in the future. Nightingale’s second batch of diagrams, a three-act data story about the importance of sanitary reform. Marey’s epic contribution was the development of chronophotography: extraordinary scientific experiments with early cameras that inspired motion pictures, powered flight and modern art.

What is the mandate for Visionary Press?
On our dust jacket we describe: “Information Graphic Visionaries is a book series celebrating spectacular data visualization creators with original research, new writing and beautiful visual catalogs.”

The immediate mandate for Visionary Press is to make our Visionaries series successful. (See our books at VisionaryPress.com!) We printed a bunch and are shipping worldwide.

In the medium term, we look forward to exploring how to reclaim some of the glory of printed information graphics. Along the way, our aspiration is to help us figure out how printed matter can matter more.

Let’s talk a bit about what your three protagonists contributed to information design. How would you describe each one in terms of influence and impact?
If you close your eyes and think of America you might think of a continental shape stretching from the Atlatnic to the Pacific. Emma Willard’s graphics helped establish that aspirational meme of America—a land of opportunity from sea to shining sea—a vision that persists to today. Her graphic histories of America were the first of their kind. She sold over a million textbooks and was an early force for educating young women. Some of her work was copied, and rippled down for decades. But her most daring graphic feats were too sophisticated to be imitated and disappeared from public knowledge.

Florence Nightingale’s persuasive diagrams were at the heart of the sanitary movement, one of three technological revolutions credited with saving over a billion lives. I liken her graphics to the success of charts like the slave-ship diagram used by the British abolition movement, or the shaded maps used by American suffragettes. Nightingale used graphics to persuade influential people to social progress.

Marey wrote the first illustrated explainer about data visualization. His text showed dozens of examples, establishing the first critical catalog of historic work. He gave data graphics our first history—a sense of time, place, momentum and meaning.

The design of each volume is splendid. I hadn’t realized the scale of the volumes—there is a quality the reminds me a little of Tufte’s books. Was there a nod in his direction?
Thank you. Series designer Lorenzo Fanton elevated our design in ways I was unable to imagine. Early on we analyzed many designs, including Tufte’s.

Today, books have to fight to exist. Books have to fight to not be a PDF. I want to make books that deserve to be real, to be alive.

Information designers have a proud tradition of being frustrated with typical publishing and blowing lots of money making books the way we think they should be made. Many of these self-published (and often self-financed) works are now cherished icons. This history encouraged me to dare to make beautiful books.

Edward Tufte is the most familiar example of this phenomenon. Before him, the most significant belligerent was Willard Brinton, whose 1914 book is a classic and 1939 self-published book, Graphic Presentation, is a masterpiece.

My goal is to build a system that allows me to make beautiful books with experts and artisans I enjoy working with. I am proud that, from the start, I’ve been able to share this joy with many contributors.

I am assuming there are more to come. Am I wrong?
There are many stories to tell and graphics to show. We have a roadmap through many titles.
We are lucky to launch with three titles. They create a vibrant landscape for us to play on. They feature different time periods, creator profiles, geographies, graphic types, languages, etc. My ambition for the next titles in the series is to push our boundaries further. We are going to dive into more exotic craft and see how all kinds of remarkable people did great things with data graphics.

Given the quality of these books, is Visionary Press a sustainable model?
Visionary Press will expand to a range of publication formats. (Right now, we also have some print information graphics in addition to the Visionaries books.) I’m excited to figure out what a $40 book offering from us looks like.

All that said, things are weird right now. The global supply chain crisis is real. Since fundraising this project: Paper costs doubled. Shipping costs quadrupled. The situation highlights the burden of relying on overseas for high-quality production. (Our books were beautifully produced in Italy.)

What do you have in store? Other visionaries of information? Or simply other visionaries?
We’re working hard right now to get Visionaries delivered to nearly every state and over 40 countries. What a start!

Behind the scenes, I have a roadmap through a couple dozen potential titles related to maps, diagrams and charts. To become real, a title must have: 1) spectacular graphics; 2) a fascinating story; 3) expert contributors who can help relate it all to today’s reader. That’s the concept: It’s not a photo book. It’s not a wall of text. It’s the integration that’s interesting. That’s information graphics!

I love information graphics because each one contains a hopeful aspiration of shared understanding. In that spirit, I believe we are all visionaries when we see a little bit better, together.

Back in the 1920s, pictorial statistics, now known as data visualization, began as a means to reeducate societies and inform the masses through accessible and understandable signs and symbols. Visual languages emerged from the most complex to the most reductive.

Among my favorite infographics, and I say this in all sincerity, can be found in a little book by O. Spurgeon English M.D. titled Personality Manifestations in Psychosomatic Illness: Visual Aid Charts to Psychotherapy, published in 1952. Sadly, the illustrator is anonymous, but he deserves accolades for describing in expressive painterly terms how psychology and psychopathology interface with human behavior.

This may look like it came from a graphic novel, but it’s spot-on serious. Nonetheless, despite the uniqueness of vividly illustrating these manifested problems and their impact on all parts of the body, from the gastrointestinal tract to the emotional center of the brain, what we have here is arguably a form of visual TMI.

That said, although medical art has improved greatly, there is something refreshing about these art brut paintings. They don’t pull punches. The characterizations may or may not represent you or me on the outside, but on the inside there is something here so truthful that is audaciously sublime. Thank your Mr. Data Visualizer, whoever you are.

In the short introductory text of So We Spin (creation and graphics by Joe, and verse by Elinor), Joe poses a challenge: “Are You a Wheel or a Cog?”

The text reads, in part: “Two years ago I set out to prove that the simplest and most direct form of communication is the symbol. Stripped of all nonessential elements, it is the graphic expression of concept and identity. Through a few lines I could symbolize the differences in people and their roles in society. At the beginning, this private challenge seemed fairly easy to resolve.”

I was surprised to find this volume in an overflow stack of books that I haven’t looked through in decades. Having never heard Selame’s name, I hopped on a search engine to find that the first hit—one of only a few citations—was Selame’s 2011 New York Times obituary, citing as accomplishments brandmarks for major American companies, including Apple Bank; CVS (he simplified the original name, “Consumer Value Stores,” to the better-known initials); the red, yellow and green traffic signal of Stop and Shop; and the Goodwill Industries face logo. But what surprised me most is that, well, I wrote the obituary … and completely forgot I had done so.

Aside from his triumphs as identity designer and strategist (alongside his wife, who died in 1977), So We Spin is something of a missing link in the world of information graphics that exhibits a commitment to social commentary. It is a tale relevant today, addressing the status of discrimination and inequality, and is a statement about the inevitability of social revolution, a fairly radical idea for a brand strategist then or now.

The story about economic and political power in American is best explained in the following continuation of Selame’s introduction: “I found that characters such as those who have (Gots) create those who want (Antigots) and those who need (Nogots). Machine-oriented Teknos find their antithesis in human-oriented Hipnos, and so on. The symbolic family of Man grew larger and larger. As patterns of the interrelationships of the various characters began to evolve, questions arose. Is there a natural balance of people in society? Does society work better with more or less certain types of characters? What effect does the average man (Middie) have upon sociological conditions, and vice versa? Can these symbols be used to project societies at work?”

Without mentioning the symbol pioneers Otto Neurath and Rudolf Modley, Selame references this important sociopictorial trend in data visualization.

“This book,” he concludes, “will help you to identify your role within a complex society, and expose the importance (or irrelevance) of the part you play. And so we spin …”

The book is “written” with graphic shorthand that is as current (and modern) today as it was over 50 years ago. (If you enlarge the individual images, the text may even surprise you.) I am still unsure where Selame Design Associates (which in 1995 was renamed BrandEquity) fits into the history of brand theory and practice, but it is more than clear that the Selames’ contribution was not insignificant.

As Forrest details, the journey to the publication began on the Society’s website. “While there have been academic journals and data viz zines in the past, there has not been a dedicated weekly publication that focused on the full spectrum of data visualization–related issues. Most of our content is submitted by our global membership and covers a broad set of topics, from design explorations, how-to, career advice, ethics and data viz history to anything else we can think of that has some relationship with data viz or information design. We feature experts and novices alike, and welcome anyone to get involved.

“We expanded to a print magazine because we think there’s a real need to make our work more tacit, and hopefully longer-lasting.”

Why did you go the print magazine route in an age of digital information?
While we think of the internet as being a vast archive, it is surprisingly transitory. We’ve published over 1,000 articles in the past three years, but you can’t hold any of them in your hand or put them on a shelf. Creating physical objects establishes a totally different dynamic for how we regard them. We keep magazines for years, share them with friends or leave them for a chance read around the house or office. A lot of data viz is digital, so creating a print magazine opens new avenues for how we can archive the ideas of our community and share great work in a new format.

How do you see your mission? Are you addressing a range of data collection and display or do you have a POV, like Neurath and his followers?
When data viz is effective, it’s more like magic than mere communication. We love data viz when it grabs your attention and tells a story that you believe more than the essay that surrounds it. We love the alchemy of design, statistical representation and story that really cuts to the heart of the “so what?”

I personally try to engage, support and hopefully inspire people to think of data viz in a longer, deeper history of visual communication that extends far beyond the basic charts we can make with almost any office software and stretches into the defining moments of our society. I see our work in the context of history, building off all aspects of visual representation used to convey some kind of statistical version of the truth, be that extravagantly illustrated or scientifically focused. I am an Otto Neurath scholar, so I deeply empathize with his idea of “educating through the eye.”

What is the most important aspect of so much available data? And what are the dangers?
Data is weird—in some ways it is an exact representation of the real world, and at the same time is a total abstraction of it. Yes, we need all this data to help us understand the world around us and show us the trends about where it might be going, but at the same time, data is only one concept in the very messy real world and can easily lose its meaning.

COVID-19 is a great example, in that the story of COVID was actually the telling of the nuance of its data. Teaching people about rolling seven-day averages and the deeply human exercise of public health data collection was too difficult to explain and too abstract to photograph. Data visualization became the way billions of people could understand what was happening, through maps and charts. When we hit major milestones like 500,000 or 1,000,000 deaths in the USA, we also turned to data viz in an attempt to gain some perspective of how massive that kind of human toll is.

Data viz used to be a prized skill practiced by illustrators, cartographers and other specialized designers. When computers came on the scene, the difficulty of creating a chart dropped dramatically but arguably so did the creativity of its display. Data viz isn’t just the output from a big data warehouse or some data science analysis—it is the human interface of how we use the knowledge.

Why are you using the name Nightingale? Is it a reference to Florence?
Yes! Our name pays tribute to the history of data visualization as embodied by the work of Florence Nightingale. Her pioneering efforts to sanitize hospitals and establish the field of nursing were largely accomplished because of her lifelong interest in collecting data and her ability to spread her influence through the impact of visualized data. We celebrate the innovation, creativity and enlightenment that historic data visualization practitioners like Florence Nightingale inspired among their communities, and seek to do something similar in our world today. We also like that the name Nightingale is both poetic and rooted in something larger.

As an editor, how do you picture your readers? What do you want them to receive from you? How do you want their work to take shape?
We’ve been calling our first issue a community celebration as we created Nightingale in collaboration with 98 people, shipped to 53 countries around the world, and are constantly in touch with our collaborators and community via social media every day. I feel like I have an accurate picture of what our community is—because we’ve helped support it day after day, and continue to do so.

Personally, I want our readers to see Nightingale magazine as fun! We’ve been told that people have been anticipating the arrival of the magazine, that they have been running to meet the postman every day. We want to keep that sense of excitement in our work. The data viz community is vibrant, disjointed, multifaceted and even difficult to define—and that makes it super interesting! We feel like the first few years of Nightingale have helped to broaden the discourse of what we talk about in our community—but Mary, Claire, Julie and I feel like we’re only just scratching the surface of what is possible.

To order a copy or subscribe, click here.

Unlike bulk marketing emails, transactional emails are one-to-one communications, making them a powerful channel for engagement.

Transactional emails are typically related to subscriber account changes or transactions, and are often triggered by a request or action from the contact. Examples include order confirmations, password reminders, product notifications, or account balance updates.

“Some people don’t recognize the opportunities in transactional emails, but marketers are becoming savvy about making sure all the ‘real estate’ that touches the customer is optimized,” says Chris Beauregard, Director of Product Management at Mailchimp.

Learn how to use transactional emails and what rules apply to these important communications.

—Hans Hoffman

Technology experts claim that the acceptance and growth of any new technology is a slow progression. It’s a slow income time, placid and shallow at first, slowly growing until the degree of acceptance surges, suddenly becoming a wave that floods everything in its path. The internet grew out of military communication concerns, and blossomed from small utilitarian protocols into the complex living organism that now dominates culture and commerce. Today, we are walking in the shallows of artificial intelligence technologies, and small waves are gently lapping at our ankles. However, those who understand AI know that the tsunami is on its way. At the very least, the changes resulting from AI will be fully enveloping for designers and creators. If we don’t understand or learn how to manage the AI that is currently being incorporated into communications and creative tools, it could undermine humanity’s role in controlling in creativity as we know it.

Artificial intelligence is more than just complex mathematics— it is a process of securing information, turning it into optimized data, and using algorithms to find the best prediction. That best solution is then used to effect some desired result, guiding the car to a desired destination, and navigating the next turn safely. Choosing the best background for an image may involve turning a 2D image into a realistic 3D rendering and, in the process, turning a mere snapshot into a false reality. These are the obvious, open, and sometimes notorious uses for AI; it is the hidden or more subtle uses of the technology that create its seductive powers. The AI chip in your mobile device guides you on your walk, chooses the best images to post, and tells marketers what ads to show you. Social media apps determine who, or what, will be interesting based upon your purchases, browsing histories, and past interactions. All these functions ride on top of artificial intelligence engines. But AI is not limited to social media technologies— they are just the low hanging fruit for AI creators. The real magic is evident in computationally complex apps, such as applications commonly used by designers.

Design programs are starting to use AI extensively. They’re most visible in magical completion of the missing parts of an image, smart deletion of unwanted backgrounds, auto color, auto exposure and image sharpening tools we use. Designers and photographers have become extremely reliant on these aides, and in response, the way we design and take photographs has changed. It is a self-reinforcing cycle. Adobe, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, among others, rely on AI to make their products easier to use. This simplicity of use comes with a complex trade-off. The data and access to information you give to cloud-based app providers is much deeper than most people understand. This access may even extend to data stored on your hard drive, on the cloud, and even on your mobile device. AI is always searching for data and the creators of AI-enhanced technologies are very creative in the way they consume your data. Why? More data makes the reach with consumers deeper; it may make the product better, more seductive and, undoubtedly, it makes the provider more valuable. However, the use of AI has an echo chamber effect— not only does it affect outcomes, it also shapes decisions regarding inputs. What happens when effect shapes the design brief? I believe AI will eventually become a more commonplace tool for making business decisions. When this happens, AI will begin to influence and shape the creative work product. It will start slowly, but at some point, business managers will likely rely on AI to make even more decisions. But as AI gets better, does that make it any more trustworthy?

Business owners want to ensure the process of creating, designing, and marketing products and services is efficient and, above all, results in measurable profits. Shiny new concepts and tools are always welcome, and few are as new and shiny as artificial intelligence. The process of classic design thinking relies on securing information about customers and understanding their needs, followed by ideation, prototyping, testing, and reiteration. Current AI technology is a perfect fit for the first and second part of this process. As the technology improves, the remaining processes will easily be incorporated into AI design processes. The problem with AI in this context is that it must rely on what it learns, and it only learns from the information that is given. Typically, the humans providing this information are not artists or designers. They are low-paid assembly line knowledge workers who make decisions based on a lowest cost basis. Humans then construct the algorithms that tell the computer what data to use. Designers have little to no influence during this process; they just have to live with the results.

Fields that rely on AI tools include transportation, industrial operations, banking, communications, manufacturing, and medicine. But AI is affecting every industry, and design software is not immune to this trend. Adobe states that their new analytics software, Adobe Sensi, is a set of tools will help designers “optimize and scale user experiences” with “real-time intelligence” and help marketers predict customer behavior based on “attributes, differences, and conversion factors.” Stated simply, what Adobe and similar companies are promising is that AI will create shortcuts, like an easy path from design to market success. But designers should remain mindful that creativity, good artwork, and good design are inherently human pursuits. Will these tools create a valid shortcut in the creative process, or hinder its natural progression?

So when, and how, should we use AI to enhance creativity? While it can be a helpful addition to a design toolkit, designers must understand how it can influence creative processes as it becomes prevalent. AI creates the promise of easy answers, or at least, a faster way to get usable solutions. For a product manager or business owner, any tool that makes it easier to understand customers and their desires is a good thing. The problem with AI in design is that, because usable data is difficult and very expensive, tool creators will be tempted to use the same data sets repeatedly. This is dangerous, as the overuse of certain data will inevitably create bias in the algorithms guiding AI. While the information within an AI solution is what creates its magic, it’s also a significant part of its danger. At the very least, resulting designs will soon lose their distinctiveness.

An artist / designer who chooses to work with AI must remain mindful of the fact that it is not one single technology. Facial recognition, gaming, and many creative uses of AI use Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) networks, a type of machine learning that is also used to create deep fakes. To my knowledge, the issue of licensing a person’s image and subjecting the photos to GANs manipulation has not yet been addressed. If a designer is working with GANs technology, the model release should at least identify that the photos may be computer manipulated.

Deep learning is a subset of AI machine learning that incorporates additional neural networks. This technology is usually associated with automation and “teaches” an AI application to make better decisions for performing analytical and physical tasks without human involvement. This technology could also train a design application to use tools in the designer’s own style or manner of working. If these applications are cloud-based and served to your workstation on demand, review the settings to ensure that you are comfortable with the default level of sharing. You may wish to avoid granting excessive access to the information you’ve created while working with the application.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and their cousin, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are another subset of machine learning. CNN technology is commonly used for image classification (identifying an object in a picture) or feature recognition (identifying patterns and voices), while RNN is associated with speech recognition tasks. Designers who create work that incorporates image and/or voice recognition, such as UX and UXI, should be aware these technologies require specific methods of input which may affect the final UX experience. Designers will also find that computer processing power will impact the possible implementation of their designs. Designers who create UXI for reinforcement learning systems, such as teaching machines that manage large data sets, must ensure they understand the limitations of the technology. In this case, it’s important to ask questions about the type of user, as well as how the design will be used. Find out if the computing devices and human interfaces have input or graphics display limitations. You can always ensure a better solution by learning about the intended uses for a design that interfaces with AI.

As AI tools become more sophisticated, they will certainly go on to influence choices in prototyping, fonts, color ways, image styles, and design element placement. In sum, design decisions will become based upon data selected by third parties who may or may not be designers. Choices by AI engines will not evince the creativity, imagination, and exploration that all good designers exhibit. All of which leads to the following questions: who is selecting the data? What is their design experience, and what are the criteria for selection or exclusion of information? If there are weaknesses in these choices, they contribute to the bias inherent to the algorithms. If this consideration goes unchecked, AI will corrupt creativity and design. The danger of such shortcuts will result in questionable choices being “baked into” a project, and will be part of many projects when an AI engine is used repeatedly. The results will feel devoid of the search and discovery that form the uniquely human elements of creativity. The wise designer will come to understand that while AI is a design aid, it is not a solution to design problems.

For Mérite’s first project with RAND Art + Data, she used images of dollar bills stacking up to physically represent the cost of prescription drugs in the US. In her latest work, however, she explores the radicalization and deradicalization of extremists by collaging snippets of text from interviews RAND researchers conducted with former extremists and their family members to create three visual narratives.

Mérite elaborates on her “Describing (De)Radicalization” project below.

How did you come to this text collage concept as a means of representing RAND’s radicalization and deradicalization research?

As an information designer, I tend to focus on quantitative data. But in the case of this subject, violent extremism has been treated many times with this angle of faceless figures: numbers of crimes, numbers of victims, numbers of financial impact—remember the focus on the physical damages after the assault on the Capitol?

Upon reading RAND’s report and their collaboration with two nonprofits dedicated to families affected by violent extremism, it was clear that RAND researchers had put a lot of care into avoiding this path. Their research didn’t focus on the numbers. It embraced the concept of radicalization as an individual experience defined through the words of those who lived or still live through it. The report gave voice to those who went in and out of radicalization and their families. They also drafted the insights in purposeful, non-judgemental words. No numbers would be true to these voices; only words could be. And only together, with words from the people and from the researchers, could a complete image be created. 

I first came up with the idea of drafting two visual narratives—one of radicalization and one of deradicalization read parallel to each other. But after executing the first draft, I realized it felt like it wasn’t representing the complexity of extremism and how some factors that would radicalize one person would deradicalize another and vice versa. Thus, I created a third version merging both letters. The team decided that we couldn’t choose the separate narrative or the merged one. Altogether, the three collages create the most realistic portrait of the report’s insights into radicalization. 

Mentally and emotionally, what was it like for you to work with this type of subject matter? Do you have any personal connections to radicalization/deradicalization?

I don’t have a direct connection to radicalization in the sense of knowing someone currently radicalized at the point of falling into violence. But I do know people have been victims of extremists. I also folks injured during the terrorist attack of the Bataclan in France in November 2015. 

After this attack and the one on Charlie Hebdo, I remember a bit of fear, but mainly a sense of bewilderment. I wondered, “How could someone support values so adamantly that it justifies taking someone else’s life, someone they have no relationship with?” Since then, the government in France has been filing individuals considered to be a serious threat to national security under a “fiche S” status. I remember a government official explaining in an interview how these people, often young people, end up flagged “S.” Their mothers, desperate and devastated at the news, would call the authorities on their sons and daughters. It really touched me; radicalization impacts not just one person but often their family and friends. They are left with no other choices than hoping our institutions would rescue their loved ones, sometimes with severe consequences like jail or police intervention. 

Reading the testimonies in RAND’s report, I felt the same way. One could almost hear the despair and pain that led to this turn toward extremism. I had to read it in small chunks because it was overwhelming at times. With sadness, but also joy, too—reading about what made some of these individuals turn back to a more peaceful life.

What do you hope a viewer experiences when viewing this project? What message were you trying to communicate?

First, I wanted people to know the signs of radicalism. 

I believe everyone knows someone close to them who utters remarks that are profoundly dehumanizing about a person from a different ethnicity, with beliefs other than theirs, from another gender, or people in other political circles—someone who could one day turn to violence. It was really transparent in the report that radicalization could touch anyone. We all should be able to identify those signs. But more than this, and why the report felt so important, is how it conveyed vital information that would empower families and organizations about how to fight and prevent radicalization in their loved ones. That was a message that felt urgent to communicate. 

The pandemic, but also the climate crisis and racial inequities, are highlighting tremendous fissures in our societies, fissures galvanized by blame and intolerance for the “other.” It seems to only get worse. RAND’s work shows that systemic and institutional actions may not be appropriate for this type of issue—a human, personal, and kind approach is. Testimonials, as well as patterns identified by the study, showed kindness and non-judgemental dialogues make powerful tools to bring peace to those susceptible to following radical ideologies. Radicalization is born, first and foremost, out of suffering.

Why have you chosen information design as your artistic practice? What about information design and data visualization excites you?

I never consciously chose to become an information designer. 

I’ve always been creative at heart, writing poems and drawing, but I was also a science-head. I pursued a career in human biology first. It was, of course, fascinating to learn about how our bodies work. But also how impactful scientific progress could be for all of us. Since I was a child, I’ve always wanted to have a bigger purpose, and I think I already knew that research wouldn’t work for me during my M.S. in immunology. The results were not immediate enough, and I felt like it didn’t feed my soul the way creativity did. I would always spend more time designing the layout of the report or the graphics of my presentation than actually spending time on the research itself. 

I stumbled on the concept of information design through the work of Nadieh Bremer, Eleanor Lutz, and Giorgia Lupi. It was an immediate career crush! I decided to make the jump and went to night classes to learn design. It just felt like a perfect match for both the right and left sides of my brain. Information design allows me to feed my curiosity while sharing these important scientific discoveries to create a better world. I hope to share information in a way that allows people to develop more empathy towards one another. It is my language of change.

What has your experience within the RAND Art + Data artist-in-residency program been like so far?

Incredible and challenging, but in the best way! I’ve been very intimidated by the idea of being the third artist of the residence, following in the footsteps of the amazing Giorgia Lupi and Morcos Key. But the RAND team has been wonderful to work with, ensuring that their research would get faithfully translated. It’s always rewarding to work directly with those who have done the research, who were on the ground for it, and wrote the reports, but also with those who work so hard to communicate it to a larger audience.

Through this reimagination, the designers created a visualization that presents the employment system as approachable, easy to change, and more uncomplicated to navigate because, as we all know, right now, it’s none of those things.

In the last 40 years new industries have emerged, from machine learning to streaming video, that have created countless new jobs that nobody of legal age to currently work in them could have planned for. Despite our constant innovation, the U.S. approach to education and workforce development still runs on a 20th-century model.

For the second quarter of Art + Data, RAND Corporation collaborated with Brooklyn-based designers Morcos Key to reimagine how we think—and should think—about workforce development and the employment system. The visualization, “A 21st-Century Workforce Development System,” pulls key findings from RAND’s research to envision workforce development that accounts for the skills and balance needed to thrive today—and the non-linear path we take to our destinations. 

“In creating the visualization for the newly proposed system for workforce development, we wanted to make entertaining and accessible what is otherwise an abstract concept,” said Morcos Key. “The open spiral is a metaphor for this journey that unfold throughout one’s life, with goals such as Learning, Working, Adapting and Thriving. We used simplified illustrations to represent top level concepts like the Education System or the Economy on a highly interconnected system with multiple access points.”

The visualization constructs the ideal workforce preparation pipeline, creating new possibilities that move the United States to a system that accounts for workers’ needs for lifelong learning, disruptive changes in technology, and the ever-evolving nature of work.

Project Credits

Marcos Key

Many of us sought refuge in handicrafts during quarantine, whether as a makeshift form of therapy or simply because we suddenly had so much time on our hands. Designer Olivia Johnson crocheted her way through 2020, but she did so as part of a powerful project reflecting on COVID-19 called Women, Work, & Covid-19.

As a Senior Designer at Instrument in Portland, OR, Olivia crafts socially thoughtful work through design and data. She previously co-created Ball Magazine with funding from the Baltimore City Health Department to address the HIV crisis in Baltimore and led on True Colors, a collection of flags she designed with each layer reflecting information about the flag’s corresponding state.

Pre-COVID at the start of 2020, Olivia created Women’s Work, a digital compilation of 12 cross-stitched artworks representing data about the inequity women face in the workplace. Then COVID took hold, and Olivia decided to create a continuation of Women's Work that would serve as a commentary on the state of working women during the pandemic.

Women, Work, & Covid-19 is a poignant, multimedia depiction of how COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted women, particularly women of color. Olivia made crocheted panels in tan, dark green, marigold yellow, and grey-blue hues to visually represent staggering statistics that underscore the setbacks working women endured due to COVID, which have some referring to the ensuing recession as a “shecession.” The crocheted pieces have been digitized and compiled online within an interactive website that users can click through from slide to slide, with each reflecting a different statistic sourced from either the Pew Research Center, McKinsey & Company, or CNN.

“My use of textile art is meant to add meaning to the data,” says Olivia on the project’s site, “symbolizing ‘women’s work’ in both the content and the medium.” Olivia’s use of crochet adds greater depth and richer meaning to what would otherwise exist as numbers on a page.

While many designers come to the arts specifically because they reject math, analytics, and all things left-brained, some actually use statistics and numbers as the backbone of their artistic practice. Giorgia Lupi is one such designer.

Giorgia is a Pentagram Partner and information designer who has been collaborating with RAND Corporation as their inaugural Art + Data artist-in-residence for the last three months, and she just unveiled her third visualization within the program—a sculpture titled “Connecting the Dots on Income Equality.”

It’s Giorgia’s first sculptural data visualization, and it comes on the heels of her two previous works for the RAND Art + Data Residency, Internet of Bodies, and an infographic depiction of findings from a 2021 RAND report on mental health.

Her new sculpture is a three-dimensional installation representing the evolution of Americans’ income over the last 40 years that utilizes circular cutouts of found objects like personal checks, receipts, bank statements, and other documents, all in various colors, dangling from three layers of string within a 6-foot wooden frame. The large-scale sculpture also gets accompanied by a legend to indicate what each facet of the work represents.

Giorgia uses the principles of “data humanism” in her art, meaning she assesses data to uncover the human stories behind the numbers, debunking the prevalent notion that information is impersonal, inaccessible, and sterile. With ”Connecting the Dots on Income Equality,” Giorgia makes physical the statistics that portray the extreme inequities in the US economic system.

Lupi’s goal was to find a way to physically show the negative space between America’s richest folks whose wealth has increased exponentially—and even surpassed the growth rate of our economy—and the remaining 90% of Americans whose income has grown slower than our economy.

Giorgia’s finished product is compelling in numerous ways—visually, narratively, conceptually. She’s set the bar high for what can be achieved through the RAND Art + Data Residency, as a new artist will take her spot next quarter to try their hand at visually representing RAND’s public policy research.

One of the windfalls of the pandemic was that moving my office to my home allowed me to rediscover my old drawing table. It had been sitting in the basement in a heap for years gathering dust. If I'm stuck working at home, at least I could start drawing and cartooning again.

When I was an art student and an intern at a Boston design firm, I was struck by how one partner did the design work at his drawing table while the other partner had the office with the couch and the coffee table where he entertained the new clients. I swore I would be the partner with the drawing table. And yet, years later, when I was a partner and the Macintosh was changing the role of a graphic designer, I found myself entertaining clients. The drawing table was disassembled. I had hoped one of my kids would want to use it—neither showed any interest. So, the drawing table moved from apartment to apartment and finally settled into the basement of our house.

Six months into the pandemic, I started to get used to the idea that I wasn’t moving back to the office in the city any time soon—if ever. I began to think about what I wanted in my new home office. There was no need to set up any space to entertain clients—that would now be done by Zoom.

Over the years, the “office” in my house had become a space for storage. But it was to become a real office: a desk for my Mac, a new printer, a shelving unit, and a few filing cabinets. But I didn’t want it to be just another office. I wanted it to be a place for design and creativity. So, I put together my drawing table. It’s an old oak table small enough to tuck into the corner. I can swing my chair and instantly become an artist again!

I started by going through the work I produced in my twenties when I used to submit batches of cartoons to magazines. I have a stack of rejection letters from The New Yorker and other publications, though I did manage to get a few published in trade magazines like Successful Meetings and comics collections like Funny Times and Comic Relief. I started republishing them on Instagram. Then I found my cartoons published in my high school newspaper, and I put them on Instagram, too. I started sketching again and publishing a new series of cartoons on weekdays. Having the drawing table out all the time made it easier to do a quick sketch or jot down a new scheme. I also started keeping a diary of ideas. Even if I didn’t use the drawing table as much as I liked, it still called out to me every day, ready and willing to be part of my life whenever I wanted it to be.

The drawing table began to influence my design work. Sometimes an idea I had for a cartoon would become a headline or concept for my design work. I had jotted down “What do you want to be from now on?” as a cartoon concept, and it became the headline of a new blog article. But my drawing table had bigger plans.

At my design firm, we were working on a client project for The Legal Aid Society. We had developed a new vision statement and consumer personas for ideal donors for their LGBTQ+ Unit on Policy and Law. The Unit is a critical resource for over 2000 Legal Aid defense lawyers and an advocate working on behalf of LGTBQ+ people who are incarcerated. We needed to consolidate hundreds of pages of content into a brisk fundraising pitch. How can we take so much content and whittle it down to a quick prospect pitch?

The drawing table nudged me. This is a cartoon problem.

A good cartoon synthesizes complex stories and ideas into essential images and captions. I swiveled my chair from the desktop to the drawing table. I pulled out my markers and marked up the paperwork with extensive highlighting. Then I mapped out a series of comic strip circles and boxes and started roughing out the high points of the pitch.

I incorporated more details. The drawing table encouraged me to sketch out concepts with headlines and captions and even some dialogue that told the story quickly and effectively.

We presented the concepts to the client for feedback. Do these topics make sense? How do they relate to the vision statement and the customer personas that we developed for the campaign? Erin Harrist, attorney for The Legal Aid Society’s LGBTQ+ Unit said, "It was a very eye-opening experience. We gave the designers so much material, and they were able to distill it into content that resonates with potential funders.”

Once we had confirmed the content was on track, Jim Keller, our design director, and I designed a new promotional tool following the client’s branding standards.

Why go back to the drawing board?

The other day I was preparing for a new pitch meeting to promote a series of seminars and a dinner gala for a new nonprofit prospect. I wrote out the description of services and made a list of the promotional components that we recommended. But I thought this needs to be visual. I know how to create a master chart in InDesign and map out the campaign so the client can see how everything works together. But we don’t even have the job yet, and it’s a lot of work to properly build the chart. The drawing table nudged me again.

“Just draw it out,” it seemed to say. I grabbed my markers and quickly sketched out the campaign. The very act of doing this clarified the idea and the components for me—and the sketch became the centerpiece of my presentation as I shared my screen on Zoom. The client immediately saw—and understood—the scope of work we were proposing. I sent the written proposal over as a follow-up along with the drawing and closed the deal.

We’ve learned that adding more drawing to the process invites more discussion and collaboration with the client. The computer tools often make projects look “too final” and discourage the dialogue and feedback that sketches encourage. Drawing more has made me feel more creative and has challenged me to push concepts that often get tossed aside on the computer. This process leads to more effective solutions that save clients time and money because they get what they need sooner. And for me, it’s made being a designer fun again.

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David Langton, founder and president of Langton Creative Group, has 25+ years as a business and creative team leader for branding and communication programs. He is the co-author of Visual Marketing (Wiley Publishers), a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and an adjunct professor at Hostos College/CUNY, where he teaches courses in design and media studies.

Today we’re sharing five data visualization artists that are helping transform the way we think about figures and statistics. Each designer has their own style, visual language, and, most definitely, a certain je ne sais quoi of breaking down complex information.

Federica Fragapane | @federicafragapane

Having collaborated with companies such as Google, United Nations, and BBC Science Focus, there’s no doubt in our minds that Federica knows—precisely—how to look at content in new and refreshing ways. She is a freelance informational and visual designer and often works to analyze environmental and social issues. Her Instagram feed features everything from designing the visualization of the menstrual cycle to sharing details from the letters written by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. Not only is her feed filled with examples of data visualization, but she has a TedTalk explaining her process, a Society6 page where she sells her prints, and a children’s infographic book—pure talent.

Giorgia Lupi | @giorgialupi

We recently shared a piece about Giorgia Lupi that breaks down her second visualization for Art + Data, and, as luck would have it, her Instagram feed is completely follow-worthy. As a Partner at Pentagram in New York, the co-author of the interactive book Dear Data, a Ted Talk speaker, an artist with a permanent collection in the Museum of Modern Art, amongst other accomplishments, to say Giorgia is an accomplished artist would be an understatement. With over 1,000 posts on Instagram, there’s no shortage of square-shaped inspiration, plus her highlight reels often feature behind-the-scenes peeks and sneak peeks of future work.

Nathalie Miebach | @miebachsculpture

Call me uninspired, but I never in a million years would have imagined data to showcase itself in a three-dimensional world. Nathalie Miebach calls herself a “translator of data into sculpture and musical scores.” Her work focuses on the intersection of art and science. Still, unlike other data interpreters, she explains scientific data related to ecology, climate change, and meteorology through the form of three-dimensional structures. One of my favorite pieces on her feed tracks all the sunny days in Boston, Massachusetts, in November and December of 2020; the result is a magically cheerful piece with bold pops of oranges and greens.

In her artist statement on her website, Nathalie shares, “Every extreme weather events have at least two narratives. The first is scientific, made up of temperature, wind, and pressure gradients that generate energies to build these storms and propel them forward. The second narrative is made up of human experiences, both during and long after the storms have left.”

Her artful eye, concept, and designs are all worth following.

SurReal Dataviz | @surreal_dataviz

Just because it’s called data doesn’t mean that it can’t have a sense of humor. SurReal Dataviz is an Instagram account that’s bringing wit and banter into the world of data visualization. Think of understanding the color fuchsia as a dress code as told in a Venn Diagram or the alcohol levels in your blood in the form of an exponential graph. Or how about why we put music on while in the restroom as told by a Pi Chart. While data is at the center of all the posts, the graphics, colors, and copy make for an engaging and entertaining account.

Milos Popovic | @mapvault

Maps are Milos Popovic’s format of showcasing data; however, while you think the information might be repetitive, it’s anything but monotonous. Milos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, and his research explores how countries intervene in civil wars abroad. So, it’s fair to say that maps are his thing. Scroll through Milos’ Instagram feed, and you’ll find data through the lens of maps sharing research such as “Young people aged 15-29 not in education, employment, or training in 2019,” “Parkinson’s disease mortality among female seniors,” and “Medical doctors per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018.” It’s fascinating to see how geography affects certain things previously thought of as random coincidences, but as we dig into the data, it appears nothing is just a coincidence.

“It Is What It Is”: All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump, January 2017–January 2021 is a five-volume slipcased set of artist’s books (1,622 pages) with page after page of ever-mutating grids that evoke abstract paintings, musical notation, even the processing of digital information, as the frequency and egregiousness of Trump’s transgressions increased. (Half the cards were issued in 2020 alone.)

The grids are followed by extensive textual notes (over 500,000 words total), which offer a kind of minute-by-minute, day-to-day account of the daily assault by Trump and company. Publication is scheduled for the fall, it will include Kraft’s introduction, in which he discusses the influence of John Cage (Kraft co-edited Diary: How to Improve the World), the exaltation of the futile, the impulse to turn the toxic into something beautiful, as well as the process of the project.

I asked Kraft to guide us even deeper into this claustrophobic rabbit hole of appalling behavior.

First, congratulations on receiving a 2021 Guggenheim award. It must have been a real joy to accept it during the same year that Donald Trump was trumped by democracy. How do you feel now?

Thank you, Steve! The Guggenheim came as a wonderful surprise. I received an email with the news not long after Trump left office, and it added to the euphoria I was already feeling. Aside from the fact that Trump’s departure offered a glimmer of hope for the nation and world, I was personally very relieved that my project was coming to an end. That said, my elation was, sadly, fairly short-lived. I have real concerns over the longterm effects of Trump’s presidency. We’re seeing it now in the assault on voting rights, in the brazen hypocrisy of many Republicans, and the utter disregard for verifiable facts, to name just a few things.

Trump had such a polarizing impact on too many of us. What was your reason for not hiding your head in the sand, as many did?

I can definitely understand the impulse to turn away. One of the reasons I undertook this project was because I knew it would require me to look, to listen, to really pay attention to what was going on, no matter how ugly it became. I have always had what I consider a healthy suspicion of those in power, but Trump represented a different order of magnitude. The morning after he was elected, I resolved that I would not let his racism, his xenophobia, his misogyny, his dishonesty, his assault on common decency, go unrecorded.

What inspired you to use the soccer card symbolism for cataloging as art Trump’s litany of transgressions?

I’d long imagined using soccer referee cards to make a work, to register, in a slightly humorous way, the things I think deserve to be called out (when they very often go unnoticed or face no consequences). There’s something funny to me about the gesture of brandishing such cards outside the context of the soccer field. In this case, no matter how many cards Trump received, they have had absolutely no effect—this kind of futility is very much a reflection of the world as it often is—yet the act of assigning them gave me an outlet of sorts as his offenses became more and more egregious. I was also interested in the way that the cards would accumulate as a kind of text, a record, a reading (made up simply of colored rectangles) of Trump’s presidency.

What gave you the stamina to continue your chronicle for four entire years? And would you have continued if he had indeed returned after 2020?

Some days were pretty tough, particularly in the last year, but I never considered giving up. Bertolt Brecht said, “When crimes begin to pile up, they become invisible.” People like Trump rely on us becoming exhausted and turning away, and when that happens, the offenses disappear. I was determined not to allow that to happen, and fortunately there were many others who felt the same way. I’m in awe of the journalists who were in the trenches every day, who withstood constant attacks and who persisted in creating an astonishing record of an aberrant presidency. I was also sustained by the nature of the work itself, the transformation of something repellant into something beautiful. And I was driven by my curiosity to see a finished piece that, in key ways, was not simply the product of my imagination. I had no idea how these cards would accumulate, how that accumulation would read and look. In answer to the last part of your question, I dreaded having to continue for another four years, and I really prevaricated over what I would do if Trump was reelected. Thankfully, I didn’t have to make that decision, but I hope I would have found it in me to keep going.

Other than the emotional response (horror on the one hand, and guilty pleasure on the other), what do you feel now that this project is (let’s hope) complete?

I really hope it is complete. In my darker moments, I can imagine Trump running again in 2024, and given the divided nature of the country, who knows what might happen. It’s hard to believe I’m saying this. Who would have thought that a man such as Trump—a person who brags about assaulting women, to take just one example from a litany of possibilities—could ever assume a position of prominence and power? As an immigrant, I’ve always seen the U.S. as a beacon of hope, however flawed it might be. So now, I suppose, the overarching feeling that I have is sadness, that the U.S. has sunk so low.

When you see the result of your art now, can you compare it to any other protest art of the past? Do you, in fact, see it as polemical activism or expressionism, or is there some other way of describing what you’ve created?

As I worked, history paintings were very much in mind, and I came to think of this project as an extension of that: a visual rendition of a time and place. It certainly originates as a sustained act of resistance, but I strove for the textual annotations to be as neutral as possible, without subjective commentary. The project is also linked to conceptual and durational art, and I hope that, in addition to being a record of Trump’s presidency—a repudiation of the man and what he stands for—that it has labyrinthine qualities, visually and conceptually, that sustain an extended engagement with it.

How does this series of “artist books” relate to other works you’ve done?

This is the most overtly political work I’ve made, and perhaps in some ways, the most deadpan. Much of my work is subversive and seeks to question and undermine established ways of seeing and thinking, often through acts of appropriation, alteration and juxtaposition. Those works—whether artist’s books, films, large-scale collages, etc.—often have ambiguity at their core, as I am always interested in multiplicity and the ways in which contradictory ideas can coexist. But in this case, I was driven by something not at all ambiguous: a powerful sense of outrage, and also fear. I wanted to stare down, not turn away, from something that really frightened me.

I see what you’ve produced as data points used to create an artistic entity. (There is a curious connection to W.E.B. Du Bois’ recently uncovered data visualizations about race in the U.S.) How would you like it to be perceived by the viewer?

I love those works by W.E.B. Du Bois, both for their political power and the beauty with which really important factual information is delivered. I hope It Is What It Is shares some of that beauty and power. I also hope that the reader will not only find—in the visual landscape of the work as well as in its textual minutiae—that their shock and outrage is renewed, but also lose themselves in the mysterious phenomenon that awful truths can be represented and revealed in visually beautiful and compelling ways.

How would you wish the work to be “used”? In other words, is it OK to appreciate or consume as pure propaganda? Or is there another level?

I guess that depends on how you define propaganda. The piece certainly has a bias: It originates in a subjective evaluation of Trump as a truly awful human being and sees much of what he says and does as transgressions against commonly accepted standards of behavior. But the textual annotations describing each card are facts, and I deliver them as neutrally as possible. They record his lies, his misguided actions, his profound insecurity and his disdain for the other. The text is, at times, an almost hour-by-hour account (sometimes even minute-by-minute) which, in its accumulations, tells us a great deal not only about Trump, but about ourselves, what we become inured to, what we easily forget, what still shocks us.

The cards, I hope, have a different effect on the reader. While each card represents a single transgression and has a specific meaning, they are also abstractions—ever-mutating grids shifting in color and rhythms—which can suggest many other things: music, perhaps; shifting landscapes; geological strata; the digital processing of tiny bytes of data.

My ambition is for the piece to be multilayered and offer many entry points. But the look of the piece and its content are also inextricable, and the acts of reading both, I hope, inform the other. Of course, I can’t control how people engage with it, but perhaps a person who initially approaches it as something to read for its literal information will find themselves compelled by the visual beauty of the cards, and vice versa.

Is there more you want to say in a political way that demands attention?

I’m really concerned, not just about the U.S., but also the proliferation of autocrats and manufactured “truths” all around the world. It seems to me that we’re on the cusp of something quite dangerous in all kinds of ways. I wish I could say that I’m optimistic about the choices we will make—it seems so obvious—but the rhetoric, the anger and the cowardice of many who are in a position to influence these decisions doesn’t bode well. On the other hand, this piece has hundreds of cards (in teal) awarded for all kinds of acts of resistance. That does give me hope. And as we really must continue to fight, it seems important to not lose sight of that.

There are also Easter eggs, or hidden gems, waiting for you to discover them.

Twitter designer Paul Stamatiou recently stumbled on a colorful and prideful surprise in the spreadsheet program. When you type “pride” across the columns, the spreadsheet instantly goes from dull to dazzling. Whether or not Paul discovered the trick from Google Sheets developer Ben Collins‘ popular newsletter or not, over three thousand folks favorited Paul’s tweet in just a few days.

Not only does it work if you spell pride in English, but it works in other languages as well, making for a fully inclusive celebration of pride month. Plus, some users have discovered that you can play around with the Easter egg combined with formulas to showcase “pride” diagonally or in other shapes and continue to see the rainbow effect.

You can also simply put:

=ArrayFormula(TRANSPOSE(MID(“PRIDE”,ROW(INDIRECT(“1:”&LEN(“PRIDE”))),1)))

into your A1 cell and you’ll be good to go.

After this discovery, I’m not confident any spreadsheet has a reasonable or logical excuse not to be rainbow. And while this Easter egg is fun and charming, it would be nice to see Google make more of an internal effort. Especially since their issues that arose in 2019 resulting in the company getting dropped from LGBTQ+ Equality Index after failing to remove an extremely controversial app regarding conversion therapy which they have since removed after many groups protested.

Externally, this hidden gem of a rainbow spreadsheet is lovely; sometimes, it’s what’s on the inside that really matters, but we can appreciate the little steps too.

Among the leading chroniclers and historians of graphic data methods, RJ Andrews, founder of Info We Trust studio and author of Info We Trust: How to Inspire the World With Data, guest curator of “Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination,” an exhibit about the history of information graphics at Stanford University, has contributed immensely to the heritage of charts, maps and diagrams used to educate, reeducate and enlighten. He is currently series editor for Information Graphic Visionaries: Emma Willard: Maps of History; Florence Nightingale: Mortality and Health Diagrams; and Étienne-Jules Marey: The Graphic Method (La Méthode Graphique), a Kickstarter initiative to raise exposure of these masters of the data illumination.

Throughout history, the creators who defined our current methods of organizing information have been overlooked. Emma Willard created new ways to understand and depict time; her inventions defined chronology for millions of Americans. Florence Nightingale's data stories persuaded royals and generals to adopt health reforms, preventing thousands of needless deaths. Étienne-Jules Marey revealed to the human eye what it cannot naturally see, changing not only science, but cinema and art too. His poetic book, The Graphic Method (La Méthode Graphique), was the first about data graphics and has inspired insiders for over a century. It has never been translated to English, until now.

I asked Andrews to explain the role of these visionaries and their respective impact on the design of information.

Your studio name is an interesting double entendre. When and why did you found Info We Trust?Info We Trust’s origins lie at MIT. There, I took a Media Lab class that seduced me to the world of bits. At the same time, I was becoming frustrated with how information was presented on the internet. As humans we crave maps: rich landscapes that give context. But tiny digital screens and their algo-feeds present everything in one-dimensional lists. They’re not very human. I hated it.In 2012, I gave a talk to my classmates that called for better information design. It was the first step into this world.

Would you agree that most people are wired to trust information that is presented visually and graphically?

Yes, as information consumers we intuit that graphics require more effort than the written or spoken word. That effort conveys an investment by the creator. The overall effect is the promise of a more trustworthy information artifact.What constitutes credible, what you call, information stories?

The first half of fostering credibility is to create something worthy of trust. Do a good job. The second half is to convey that your work is worthy of trust.Trustworthy design makes a positive first impression. It is correct and accurate. While a typo may be embarrassing, a single misplaced data mark is devastating. It engages the audience’s capabilities and ready knowledge, and employs familiar design conventions where they are expected.Trustworthy design elevates its data sources to the reader’s attention. It is specific in detailing what it can and cannot do. It qualifies its findings. It acknowledges editorial decisions. It anticipates and addresses criticism before it has to be voiced.Trustworthy design is vulnerable. Stand by your work. Put your name on it. Align your own reputation with the work. Remain accountable to it. In lieu of a personal relationship with the audience, the creator must convey their real, long-term commitment to the work itself. An audience will have more trust in the work when they see the creator believes in it.Finally, trustworthy design trusts the audience. Readers are intelligent, but they have not yet experienced what you have to show. Do not talk down to them as you help them see something new.

In this era of facts and alternate facts, is data visualization more or less of a bulwark against misinformation?

A lot of misinformation are true facts that are disingenuously conveyed, told out of context. Data visualization often necessarily provides context. A chart not only shows a single value, but it may also display how it arrived here over time or how it compares to other categories. In this way, context stands against misinformation because it helps relate the importance of messages.Like any communication tool, graphics can be used for ill. Sometimes very powerfully. But I find these cases to be relatively small compared to the warped textual and verbal discourse of today, where it is almost natural to strip facts of their context. At least with data visualization, to manipulate takes a little more effort.

Your new series, which launched as a crowdsourced campaign, is welcome, if only because you have introduced three individuals who have not been previously touted for information visualization. What is the principal contribution for each?We chose these three stories because they demanded to be told louder than many others we considered. Emma Willard used graphics to construct a shared vision of what a unified America could
be, for millions of people, at a time when the United States was falling apart into civil war. Her creation of the iconic map of America—a continental landmass without Canada or Mexico—is still a powerful meme today. As part of her effort, Willard also invented a perspective timeline type in the form of a temple. It remains one of the most daring ways of illustrating the human experience of time.Florence Nightingale’s principal contribution is developing the art of persuasive data storytelling. Her graphics adapt rote chart forms that were previously employed for technical analysis and dense reference. Her designs remix these forms with simple comparisons, powerful labels and witty annotations. The result is a set of attention-grabbing diagrams that attracted data-illiterate elites in ways previously impossible. Nightingale achieved one of visualization’s prized goals: clarity.E.J. Marey was the first to understand and explain data visualization in a detailed and comprehensive way. He published 1878’s The Graphic Method just in time to inspire the artform at a critical juncture. In the 1880s, data graphics benefitted from the intersection of exceptional print culture and large investments by data-driven global empires. Today, we sometimes call this a golden age of data visualization. Like other graphic cultures, data visualization was brutalized by the first World War. In many ways, digital data visualization is still in the process of re-summiting the analog peaks that Marey inspired.

Aside from you, has there been a school of scholar/practitioners today, other than Edward Tufte, who have been leaders in the historical study of data?Like the practice of data visualization, its historical study has a long tradition. Significant creators, including Charles-Joseph Minard and Otto Neurath, wrote long design essays that paid tribute to historic inspiration.At the same time that E.J. Marey published his history in 1878’s The Graphic Method, Maurice Block published a paper with a similar theme, albeit with much smaller scope. The post-WWI wave of data visualization textbooks contain histories—the best are by Willard Cope Brinton and Karl G. Karsten. Howard Funkhouser and Helen Walker wrote academic histories of the craft, independently and in collaboration, during the Great Depression.More recently, Michael Friendly’s “Milestones” project is an essential reference. Along with Howard Wainer’s publications, these are the two authors that inspire me most. Their new book, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication, is coming out soon.I’m lucky to count myself as part of a growing cohort obsessed with the history of information graphics that includes David Rumsey, Jason Forrest and Sandra Rendgen.

Are there any other visionaries in the pipeline?There's a certain amount of diversity represented in the three-book set. Diversity in geography. Diversity in creator profession. Diversity in craft. Diversity in time.We have a plan to expand this diversity into all kinds of exciting directions with many titles, with a particular focus on bringing more non-English language creators to notice. Our roadmap has two dozen titles on it, but for today, we are totally focused on making these three volumes.

Data viz has grown exponentially as a graphic design tool. Why, do you think? Has the digital age triggered a new information age? Are consumers of information grown? Has a need for analyzing data become more essential? Obviously, your books show that data visualization is not a new phenomenon, but how has it evolved into a 21st-century language?

The language of data visualization has remained remarkably stable into the 21st century. Sure, we’ve had experimentation at the margins with novel chart forms. And there’s been some really magical interactive implementations of our language. But the same encoding metaphors that have helped us convey data for over a century are still foundational.The big changes haven’t been with the medium. The big changes have been with the message and the audience. First, digital data has not just given us more data, it’s given many more kinds of data. There are many more interesting data stories to tell today because there is a great variety of data today. Second, the audience for data stories is much larger and much more data literate than ever before. In addition to a more data-driven society, people have also been trained by repeated exposure to office dashboards and newspaper data journalism. As a data storyteller, we can get more weird, more specific, faster—because the audience is now ready to fly with us.We are still in the midst of a powerful transition. Like the past information revolutions, it’s going to be a little crazy, beautiful in new ways, and very exciting.

(Go to Kickstarter page here)

UI design, when broken down, is beyond fascinating as it’s the human-first method to designing an uncluttered aesthetic for a meaningful, well-thought-out experience.

Norway-based Heydays Design Agency and their packaging studio Goods have begun to turn my dream of making the world a more visually aesthetic place into a reality with The National Recycling Symbols in Norway. They’ve created a system that labels products, public trash bins, and recycling facilities through beautifully designed icons and a color-coding system. They’ve also created an app so you can figure out where and how your trash is recycled.

They created the design system to reduce confusion when it comes to the disposal of items at the trash bin and, therefore, increase recycling rates. It’s a well-known truth that people aren’t great at recycling, and part of the problem stems from the system’s flaws: if it’s challenging to recycle, how can we expect people to take the time to understand how to do it?

Heydays Design Agency breaks down the flawed system through 90 individual pictograms that are legible at any size paired with color-coding for material types. Think green for food, red for hazardous, black for waste, purple for plastics, and so on.

To be able to help the environment through graphic design and UI is genuinely remarkable. While it might take some time for people to relearn graphic patterns, it’s well worth trying and fixing a broken system and beats a handful of recycling arrows going nowhere.

I feel excitement just reading the title. What inspired you to make I Am a Book. I Am a Portal to the Universe?

Posavec and Quick: We were sitting in a café in South London back in 2018 with the intention of coming up with new ideas for collaboration. It was at a point in our careers where we had what we called “data fatigue,” where we were growing weary of repeatedly using the same chart types over and over again in our work.

Posavec: We were also interested in experimenting with using your own physical interactions with the book to represent data, like holding the book up to the sky to discover how many stars are behind its pages. Before I moved into data I was a book/book cover designer, so I was interested in the challenge of using a book in a way it was never really meant to be used.

Quick: The whole book, even the endnotes and acknowledgements, is written in the first person, in the book’s own voice. It developed its own character as we worked on it, a theatrical personality that’s just a little cheeky and arrogant at times (though it does soften its stance as the story unfolds). So it made sense that our book would take the opportunity to use its cover to make a flamboyant display of itself. It’s a pretty bombastic title, but then that suits the book’s personality: It even relegated our names to the back cover!

The book is told from the vantage point of the book. How do you determine what one book will say about itself and others?

Quick: As we wrote it, we developed a very clear sense of the kinds of things the book would and wouldn’t say, and how it would speak to you. We drew up a list of banned words—our book would never use the words chunk, smidgen or critter (too folksy), or bug to describe insects (not wondrous enough). When we were deciding what kind of facts and data to include, we asked ourselves whether this was something that would spark awe and wonder in a reader (and in us)!

From the cover and the Dedication I get the impression that this is a book for children. But it is a much more mature concept than I expected. Who did you aim this at?

Posavec: The book is aimed at both children and adults, especially readers who would be put off by “data” or “science” in the title. So the word data doesn’t appear anywhere in the book. (Except in our bios, where it couldn’t be avoided!) We’ve since discovered the publishing industry finds all-ages books hard to categorize, so now we generally say it’s a book for children—but really it’s for everyone.

Quick: Our goal was to make scientific ideas accessible and approachable for readers of all ages without dumbing them down. We wanted there to be enough challenging content in the book to satisfy adults as well as children, so we explore ideas that aren’t necessarily common knowledge. For example, there’s a spread in the book about the bizarre consequences of relativity. The book tells you that, if you stood it upright on a table, time would pass a tiny fraction of a second slower at the bottom of the page than the top because it is closer to the earth’s center of gravity. This is mind-blowing, however old you are.

I co-authored a book, Type Tells Tales, about books that use typography as content, or rather type and typography are the protagonists of the book. In this, who do you see as your protagonist?

Posavec: Our book is ultimately the protagonist; however, it wants to use everything it has at its disposal—its inks, binding, pages, typeface and more—to show you the wonders of the universe. So you, the reader, are also a character in this process.

Miriam and I always felt that the typeface is as much part of our book’s “voice” as the tone of voice and the words that we’ve written for it today. This is also why w
e only used one typeface (FF Quixo, designed by Frank Grießhammer) throughout the book, so it doesn’t seem like it has multiple personalities!

Yours is a decidedly designed book. Every spread is, shall we call, a typographical illustration. What was your process—the words first, the visuals first, or a combination of the two?

Posavec and Quick: Our creative process was very merged and collaborative and a bit back-to-front.

We started with a blank “dummy” book created to final specifications right at the very beginning of the book creation process, when normally this comes much later on. We then spent a lot of time testing the dummy and thinking about how we could use it in original ways to communicate particular quantities—by slamming it shut to make a loud sound, wearing it as a hat to feel its weight, dropping it on the ground to time its fall, letting pages fall to displace a certain volume of air, and so on.

So we guess you could say it was very much a “concept first” process. Sometimes this concept was an interesting scientific idea, and sometimes it was just a curious or witty way of communicating data through the book—what we called the book’s visual or physical “variables.”

Next, we narrowed down our list of ideas and Miriam went away and researched the most promising ones, laying out data in a spreadsheet. We focused on the ideas that would make the most interesting stories and involved quantities on the same scale as the book (for example, weights of things around 450 grams, or one pound—the approximate weight of the book). Miriam then wrote multiple drafts of text for each spread, and Stefanie fed back on them until we had a version of each spread’s text we were both happy with that Stefanie would then begin to experiment with on the page.

We had to make lots of small adjustments to the wording to ensure that line length, rhythm, tone and the number of words on each page were all perfectly balanced and worked with the planned design concepts. Some sentences and designs went through about 40 different versions before we found the right one!

Who did what?

Posavec and Quick: Miriam did the research and the bulk of the writing. Stefanie did the design. We both came up with ideas.

The conclusion is quite an ending. You pull back a curtain, so to speak, and the readers then read about every spread, much of it about climate, nature and the stuff of life and living. Is this book intended to be a cautionary message about the here and now? Or is it a view meant to be a time capsule for the future?

Posavec: With the endnotes, which we call the Small Print, we wanted to meticulously detail all the research that went into the book. So the bulk of the book is very design-led and quite light on text, but the back end gives you all the working that went into it, like uncovering the code on a webpage. We liked the idea that from something rigorous you can distill something elegant and approachable.

Quick: As for the audience of the book: It’s very much written for the here and now. We have a page that simply says, “Everything is changing. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes quickly.” And that is an idea we were trying to capture in the book—that everything is in flux, even as you try to measure it, particularly when it comes to the climate and ecological situation. There’s a focus on those things in the book, although we didn’t want to preach: It’s more about using data to expand your awareness of the world around you. We wanted to spark wonder at everyday things, reveal invisible stuff happening (like subatomic particles floating through the book as you read it) and create something fresh that readers can use to explore the spaces around them with a sense of discovery.

His infrequent promotions, replete with witty representations of dense information, may not make me truly smarter, but certainly give me the illusion of acute understanding. Every few years I receive a Grundini printed keepsake to savor and admire. Like last year's Grundini2 (here). This year's, Grundini20Diagrams, is digital only. In an introductory greeting, he writes: "To mark 15 years as Grundini, I’ve gathered together 20 key diagrams from this period that reflect my information design legacy. From the human body to the Tree of Knowledge, from Henry VIII to Heathrow Airport and beyond." He is also big on Big Data (here).

I've selected a few highlights from the 20 to get you into the Data Tent. Designers of all ages, let's begin the show with my favorite of many …

With “Carrot Goods,” Bina Thorsen is serving up some data viz, veggie-style.

“Since this past year has been absolutely terrible, I decided to research the things that are actually getting better in the world,” she says. “I made this infographics poster series with good news, or Carrot Goods, to show all the things that are, in fact, improving.”

With most stats deriving from Hans’ Rosling’s book Factfulness, it’s a fine antidote to the toxic chatter of “fake news”—and all around, an uplifting project that provides a healthy dose of positivity in the wake of a most unhealthy year.

The information and misinformation grew exponentially as 2020 wore on. To manage the multiplying reports from every region in the world, news outlets switched to live-blogging the news. The format is often used for a local disaster or a bad day on the stock market—but now it served to report on a global public health emergency that affected everyone, everywhere.

"I started to collect headlines about the pandemic as a way of making sense of the infodemic," writes Rainbird on his website. "Often it helped to answer my question: 'How did we get here?'”

I asked Rainbird what his goal is, and what 2020 Infodemic (which will be available as a printed poster this month) will contribute to the history of this time.

What triggered you to start this daily diary of horror vis a vis the headlines? At what point did you begin to see it taking shape?

It was during the first New York shutdown in mid-March—life had turned upside down for everyone and I was spending a lot of time doomscrolling, just trying to keep up with the news. Events that seemed unthinkable only a few days before were taking place, and as the news cycle kept moving I wanted to hold onto them in some way—to bear witness. It was clear that the pandemic would create headlines every day for at least a year, and that together they could tell the story.

I lived through the polio epidemic. My memories are vague (other than seeing the posters, getting the shots and sugar vaccine, knowing some victims and otherwise being moderately scared but not scarred). Had you ever experienced anything as cataclysmic as this?

Thankfully, I haven’t. I used to think that 9/11 was the most cataclysmic event in my lifetime, but the pandemic has been a truly global catastrophe.

Had you even thought about the various pandemic predictions and flare-ups (e.g., ebola) before? What was your method for selecting your content?

Initially the news followed the virus as it moved from one region to the next, which made choosing headlines that move the story forward quite easy. By the summer, the news was getting much noisier and the process became much more editorial. I felt a responsibility to cover every region, at least in proportion to the spread of the virus—there’s a strong U.S. bias in the piece, but only because the U.S. became the largest epicenter. I also wanted to include some of the many marginal stories that were never front-page news but were still shocking (Aug. 5: Choctaw tribe hardest-hit by Mississippi coronavirus crisis). There was a lot of other news [last] year too—the George Floyd protests, West Coast wildfires, the U.S. election, and they get mentions in relation to the virus. Compared with a book on the pandemic, it’s quite reductive, so it was impossible to cover everything that happened in the economy, sport, culture, religion—all those canceled events—but I tried.

What was your rationale for selecting your type and typography?

The text itself is horrifying—a friend described it as “the advent calendar from hell”—but I wanted it to be readable without inducing panic attacks, so the typography had to be neutral. For the same reason, I also chose to convert headlines in Title Case to Sentence case. I find Title Case, which is preferred by The New York Times, to add unnecessary weight to the smallest words, and it feels sensational. I was working with black and red type (very calendar), but changed the red highlights, essentially all the numbers, to hazard orange.

Did you decide to record fact and fiction? (In many cases they often intersect.)

I decided to choose headlines from reputable sources, but it’s impossible to know if everything is factual. Often the most shocking headlines were reporting something on the horizon—impending doom, but I chose instead headlines that reported the doom as it happened. For example, “India, Day 1: World’s Largest Coronavirus Lockdown Begins” is more powerful in retrospect than “Modi Orders 3-Week Total Lockdown for All 1.3 Billion Indians” because announcements could always be reversed. There were also headline’s that were factual but were still misleading or unfair. “Couple face charges for boarding plane to Hawaii after positive COVID test” is not the whole story—the couple were on their way back home, with their child, and between connecting flights when it happened. The human part of that story is missing in the headline—so I didn’t include it.

What were you thinking as you read the news day after day—and now …?

During the shutdown my mind was in pandemic fog, and the project helped me make sense of it all. As we learned more about the virus, how it spreads and how to contain it, life—and the news—became more predictable; a new normal.

I see it is 366 days, but are you going to continue this indefinitely?

The pandemic still has a long way to go, and I’m sure there’s a second year of pandemic headlines. This year will also be a long haul but at least there will be increasing hope, thanks to effective vaccines. I don’t know if I’ll continue—it’s certainly nice to take a break from it.

Why a poster as a medium?

I wanted an overwhelming effect—366 headlines in one block of text. The poster is one way to fit all that in one space and still be legible. From a distance, the content isn’t clear; a closer look reveals some familiar events; and then the weight of the whole year becomes clear. It’s a memorial.

What do you want your audience to take away from this?

As with any memorial—never forget. The monthly death totals show the huge increases in deaths. As Al Barlett put it, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

We also took stock of our signature annual competition—the Regional Design Awards—and decided it was time to bring it into the present like never before.

When it launched in 1980, the competition had a singular goal: to show that great design was being created in cities all across the United States, and not just in the usual hubs like New York City. The democratization of the internet has only further brought that concept to powerful life, and so it was time to formally embrace the fact that no matter where a designer lives or works, the best design rises to the top.

Moreover, we were missing out on a lot of brilliant design by restricting the competition to the United States—so we did what often needs to be done in design. We completely overhauled the system, and created something new. Something modern, inclusive, and reflective of a scene that is truly global.

Meet the 2020 PRINT Awards, presented by Adobe—a collection of the world’s best design, broken down across 20 categories, and featuring not just six regional judges, but a broad international jury of 21 luminaries of contemporary design, all with deep subject matter expertise in their categories. Their criteria? Originality, Innovation, Permanence, and Execution.

We of course have a show-stopping Best of Show winner, but we also created four all-new designations: Agency of the Year (the highest-rated agency, studio or in-house brand in the entire competition, determined by the largest amount of total wins across various categories), Editor’s Choice (a piece selected by the internal PRINT team), the Citizen Design Award (a free-to-enter category focused on outstanding original design for a social cause) and the Adobe Dimension Design Award (a free-to-enter category from our presenting sponsor, celebrating work created using Creative Cloud software, and highlighting the use of Adobe Dimension and 3D).

All told, we received more than 1,300 entries from 57 countries—and the awesomeness of our judges’ selections have left us floored, and fully inspired as we roll into 2021.

As PRINT editorial director Debbie Millman said, “This year’s entries surprised us with their depth, breadth and overall excellent quality. It was a thrill to see the work.”

Here, we share the winners of the 2020 PRINT Awards—and hope you find that same thrill and inspiration.

Eyes Say More Than Words

By: Design Army

USA

Our world is louder than ever before, so we imagined a place where eyes say more than words. Set in the “Quietest Library on Earth” (a temple of hush), the film focuses on a tyrannical “Quiet Guard” who punishes patrons for the slightest sound, sneeze or gesture. But a plot to overthrow—hatched only through conversing eyes (and super stylish frames)—sparks The Silent Revolution against the overly sound-sensitive tyrant. We took visual cues from eccentric 1970s style, specifically high school yearbooks: employing quirky prints, big hair, bigger glasses. Speak Less. Say More.

Editor’s Note: We developed our Agency of the Year award to recognize the highest-rated agency, studio or in-house brand with the most wins across all categories in the entire competition. In the regular categories of the inaugural PRINT Awards, we had a tie: Design Army, with wins in the Brochures/Catalogs, Editorial, Handlettering & Type Design and Photography categories, and One Design Company with two wins in the Logos category and two wins in the Handlettering & Type Design category. We offer them both our congratulations!

Design Army

USA

One Design Company

USA

Louisville Magazine—No Justice, No Peace

By: Sarah Flood-Baumann Design

USA

In the throws of the Breonna Taylor protests, Louisville Magazine published an editorial package that highlighted a conversation with the city's Black leaders and also featured two protest-centric photo essays. My job as a designer was to bring the image words to the page with reverence and seriousness. Using Martin typeface from Vocal Type Co., and photographs from Andrew Censi and Mickie Winters, my work was thoughtful in its loudness, boldness and it was unapologetic in its frustration with the systemic racism of our world.

Hairy Situation

By: Anu Manohar

Our presenting sponsor Adobe invited designers to unleash their creativity and make a 3D impact by designing a unique piece of content using Adobe Dimension, and answering a crucial question: What does design mean to you? Winner Anu Manohar was inspired by the year of the pandemic.

“Design is a world of endless possibilities—it’s an emotion, it’s an experience and it’s a lot of great things,” she details. “But design also has its ups and downs. The COVID situation made me experience design in a different way. From being a freelance designer to a full-time employee in the past few months, I realized that design can be a hairy situation. Dealing with creativity, projects, clients, deadlines, payments, etc., during the COVID period was a whole other ball game. It brought a ton of exciting, risky and unpredictable experiences. As a reflection of my experience during this period of time, I decided to make a poster with the phrase ‘it's a hairy situation.’ I wanted to bring a hint of humor to my message rather than a serious tone. So I used expressive typography and a colorful palette to make the message light yet meaningful.”

Editor’s Note: Throughout the course of 2020, we’ve seen so much powerful work dedicated to so many vital causes—so we created this free-to-enter category to honor such design from individuals, studios and companies. We received hundreds of outstanding entries, and had trouble selecting just one to feature—so here we present a top winner, and two honorable mentions.

First Place: Creatives for Kitchens

By: Christine Clayton Design

USA

Creatives for Kitchens is a charitable initiative that has worked to assemble teams of volunteer creative professionals and match them with restaurants affected by the COVID-19 lockdown. The focus and result of our efforts have been pro-bono support for light touch updates to items such as menus, copy, signage and websites. For example, many of our tea
ms (typically a copywriter, designer, social strategist/content marketer and photographer) have collaborated to create powerful and essential social media updates to communicate the changes in service, menu and operations that restaurant patrons need to know. This is an ongoing project with no immediate plans to sunset. Direct relief for restaurants was slated on the newest stimulus bill, and with that on ice for the foreseeable future, restaurants need us more than ever.

Honorable Mention: Guide to Parking (for Those Living in Vehicles)

By: Various (see below)

USAMore than 2,700 people in Seattle/King County live in their cars due to homelessness. This brochure provides critical information on parking regulations and support services for car dwellers. In Seattle, as in many cities, a vehicle can be ticketed for being parked in the same spot for more than 72 hours. Vehicles can also be towed and impounded for having expired registration or multiple unpaid tickets. Fines and towing fees can be crippling costs that lead to seizure and loss of the car (by auction from the towing company). Besides explaining specific parking regulations, the guide explains how car dwellers can receive help from the court system and from the Seattle Scofflaw Mitigation Team, a group of volunteers who work with vehicle residents. Scofflaw Team members can accompany car dwellers to court and help them develop a plan to legally address their unpaid tickets. This brochure was designed by a group of students and faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle for ITFH, the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness. The printing of the brochure was funded by the Sappi Paper Company through their “Ideas That Matter” program.

Honorable Mention: Amidad

By: Esther Velasco

USA

In the current social and political climate, it is crucial to create a space for undocumented immigrants to feel safe, and like they are a part of something. The word Amidad is the combination of the word "Amity" with the Spanish suffix "dad," which means "characteristic of." As such, the term Amidad encourages a sense of community. The app gives immigrants tools and resources at their fingertips. The core of Amidad is our small device that can be hooked to your keychain. The device can alert family, friends and lawyers in case of an emergency involving law enforcement, as well as begin recording an interaction on your phone. Amidad is made up of two components: a resource app with easy access to immigrant-related tools and information, and an alert device to be used in emergencies. The critical app features that tie into the alert device have steps to handle cases involving ICE, such as raids or warrantless violations at a person's home. Once activated, the alert device sends a text message to designated lawyers, family, friends and local volunteers to come to observe and record the interaction. This was created using Adobe InDesign, Adobe Dimension, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

First Place: Hot Hounds

By: Rethink

Canada

Every year hundreds of dogs die in hot vehicles. To help bring awareness to this issue, we teamed up with Earth Paws and created Hot Hounds—the first and only car-baked dog treat. After being baked inside a 70°C vehicle on a hot summer day, the treats were packaged and sold in-store and online. All proceeds from their sale were donated to the SPCA.

Second Place: Heinz Ketchup Puzzle

By: Rethink

Canada

Our objective was to re-ignite an emotional connection with Heinz in a culturally relevant way to bolster consumer loyalty and reignite love. We sought to stay top of mind by instigating significant chatter across social channels and to reinforce our iconic status as Canada’s No. 1 Ketchup.

Third Place: Sunlight-Activated Florida Adventure Map

By: SPARK

USA

Utilizing UV-sensitive photochromic inks, SPARK designed a unique, interactive map that, when exposed to sunlight, reveals unexpected Florida adventures. From prehistoric caverns to rare coral reefs, bioluminescent kayaking to America’s first underwater art museum, the map highlights outdoor adventures that take visitors beyond Florida’s famous beaches and theme parks. This enabled people to see beyond the familiar destinations of Miami and Orlando and discover the wealth of diverse experiences that exist across the state, in regions they never knew existed.

First Place: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo 2019 Year-End Report

By: Anne M. Giangiulio Design

USA

I designed this Ysleta del Sur Pueblo 2019 Year-End Report for the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, a Puebloan Native American tribal entity located in the Ysleta section of El Paso, Texas. With a focus on the traditional foods of the tribe, the report features photos and text that document the creation of time-honored recipes created by various tribal members, and the stories that accompany them. To achieve this, we worked with a Tiguan photographer, whom I art directed during the cooking or baking process.

Second Place: UDEM Annual Report 2019

By: Reset Co

Mexico

[In] 2019, Universidad of Monterrey changed their communication objectives to highlight the characteristics that have differentiated them from other universities throughout their 50 years: “soft skills.” These refer to those skills focused on emotional intelligence and how you interact with other people. These skills are learned in college along with the “hard skills” (technical knowledge of careers), with the promise that through these, the university inspires the best version of its community. For the development of this graphic proposal, we applied elements of the new university campaign to be consistent in communication. In this case, in addition to the personalized alphabet made for the campaign, numbers were also created based on the "Work Sans" typo
graphy to create shapes that reinforce the UDEM pillars [while functioning] as windows into the university to visualize its achievements in 2019.

Third Place: KCAI President’s Report

By: DMH

USA

The Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) publishes The President’s Report annually to show donors the school’s ongoing advancements and accomplishments, including student success stories and data visualization. The 2018–2019 report is the first document to debut the new KCAI identity, created from its brand essence: Imagine what the world has yet to see. Its cover introduces the dynamic system in its gridmark form and its complementary “revealed blocks”—the missing components from the gridmark—through die-cut, to spark curiosity. The remainder of the piece is formatted in a gridded layout, purposefully representing the matrix foundation of the mark.

First Place: Impertinentes—14 livros de Gustavo Piqueira

By: Casa Rex

Brazil

The book compiles 14 books created by Gustavo Piqueira, produced between 2012 and 2018, that, with different degrees of intensity, sought to blur many of the existing limits between the established categories of the printed book through the exploration of the most varied articulations between text and image, visual and material, industrial and handmade, past and present, fiction and nonfiction. The cover therefore reflects two of the main dimensions of Gustavo's work: the deconstruction of “traditional” arrangements, when it appears as a book cover in which everything seems out of place and, by offering the reader the possibility of assembling/disassembling it, the playful look on the book as an object.

Second Place: Process: How to Create Community Buildings with Impact

By: HCMA Architecture + Design

Canada

The 208-page book functions as a manual to guide key decisions civic leaders need to make throughout each stage of a public building project. Projects of this nature span years and require fanatical dedication. As such, Process is housed within a sturdy canvas cover—screenprinted black with reversed-out letters intended to wear with age. The heavy-duty, tactile feel of the book harkens back to the nostalgia of "glovebox" machinery manuals that bore battle scars from use. Beneath the cover exists a black-on-white inversion of the bold typographic design, bound by an exposed spine, which metaphorically represents the design process—revealing how the book is made.

Third Place: Suspect Communities

By: Monograph

USA

We adapted an old COINTELPRO document to show the idea of surveillance and infiltration of communities. From the publisher: Suspect Communities is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. By undertaking this analysis, Nicole Nguyen offers a vital window into the inner workings of the U.S. security state and the devastating impact of the CVE program on local communities.

First Place: The X-Files: The Official Archives

By: Headcase Design

USA

The X-Files: The Official Archives is a hardcover collection of 50 FBI case files from the desks of Agents Mulder and Scully. Packed with lab results, autopsy reports, clippings, mug shots, crime-scene photos, and security camera printouts, the book allows readers to scour the evidence, immersing themselves in the story as a firsthand participant. We combined actual props used in the show with faux documents we created to meticulously build each case file. Era-appropriate FBI letterheads track the passing of time, while handwritten notes from the archiving Agent Harrison guide readers through the narrative. The goal of the book was to feel as realistic as possible, with aged and damaged artifacts that are placed in evidence bags, stapled, and clipped in the book—all meticulously rendered in Photoshop.

Second Place: Moholy-Nagy and the New Typography / Moholy-Nagy und die Neue Typografie

By: Institute Designlab Gutenberg; Isabel Naegele & Julia Neller

Germany

The extensive publication documents a three-year research project on the National Bauhaus Year. It brings together the exhibition panels by the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, recently rediscovered in the Berlin Art Library, which are illuminated with characteristic keywords by renowned authors by means of an "Abcdarium"—from A for Akzidentien to Z for Zeitungsdesign. Through associative cross-reading, the typographic cosmos of ideas of the avant-garde of the 1920s can be experienced again.

Third Place: Morla : Design

By: Letterform Archive

USA

Morla : Design is a dynamic monograph spanning Jennifer Morla’s 40-year career. Recipient of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award and an AIGA Medalist, Morla illustrates her creative process and design philosophy in the book, and shares the inspiration behind more than 150 projects. With an introduction by Paula Scher and a prologue by Erik Spiekermann, Morla : Design vividly demonstrates why design matters.

First Place: 2020 Arphic Font Library

By: Hong Da Design Studio

Taiwan

In Taiwan, font libraries have been primarily used for searching and editing, in the form of printed materials (flyers), come in various different forms resulting in difficulties when putting to use in packaging or publicity. As the numbers of font libraries increase the number of printed materials it increases, resulting in unnecessary consumption of paper and ink, which is a burden to the environment. To improve such situation, the designer focuses on three main points “conveniently assemble”, “visual diversity” and “environmentally friendly ”as the major themes for the ARPHIC Font Library, including the entire font library (from ARPHIC Technology Co., Ltd) encompassing thousands of fonts from the last 30 years that has been categorized into four collections.

Second Place: Where Ideas Lead

By: Design Army

USA

A promotional brochure to introduce the new branding tagline “Where Ideas Lead,” positioning Neenah as a partner in the creative process that provides the products and services—the solutions—to help bring brand visions to life and transform ideas into results.

Third Place: Arturo Alvarez Catalog

By: teiga, studio.

Spain

Arturo Alvarez entrusted us with the conception of a publication that visually summarized the brand's values. This publication should summarize its emotional light philosophy, handmade, crafts, design and product finishes. An art direction in photography and a design focused on showing the products through textures and representing the emotional light (lights and shadows projected in space) with a cover printed with luminescent ink that absorbs the light.

First Place: Emme

By: Deerfield

USA

EMME is rooted in the word “strength”; we wanted to create a brand that empowered women to be able to do whatever they set out to do. The name is a palindrome, and mirror quality of the logotype literally closes the loop on women’s health. Our mark is a modern-day Athena (the goddess of wisdom and the hunt) riding a tigress, and she's always a perfect shot. Our mottos are Woman on a Mission and Knowledge isPowerful and Power to the Pill. During a time when access to birth control and choice is at risk, we were honored to lead the branding with EMME as exceptional partners; led by women for w
omen. A passion project, EMME is an example of the power of branding to do good in this world.

Second Place: James Weldon Johnson Park Branding

By: Brunet-Garcia Advertising

USA

Amidst impassioned calls for social justice and racial equality across the country, the City of Jacksonville made the bold decision to remove the Confederate monument from Hemming Park, the city’s first and oldest park. Named for the Confederate veteran who purchased and installed the monument, the city recognized the opportunity to forge a new, more harmonious path forward by renaming the park after James Weldon Johnson, a Black writer, early civil rights activist, and native son of Jacksonville. We were entrusted to create a new brand identity for this historic project that would transform the park into a modern, urban space, engage diverse communities, and restore vitality to the city’s most prominent public square.

Third Place: Fisher-Price

By: Pentagram

USA

Fisher-Price is one of the world’s leading toy companies, defining the category in infant and preschool toys and playing an important role in childhood for almost a century, creating everything from “bump to bus.” Pentagram has collaborated with Fisher-Price on a refresh of its brand identity that highlights a return to a playful sense of fun. The system draws on the brand’s extraordinary heritage to build a complete visual language, and includes a custom typeface, messaging, art direction and merchandising.

First Place: IMAPI

By: Café.art.br and Odd.Studio

Brazil

The first thousand days of a child are the most important ones to guarantee a healthy development. IMAPI is a Nurturing Care Municipality Index that combines over 100 metrics that are strongly related to environmental development in these first days of a child’s life. The project is an 18-month effort from a diverse group of professionals to put together databases from 2015 and 2016 from all of Brazil's 5,570 municipalities, to create a sound, peer-reviewed methodology, and to make the results publicly available.

Second Place: A Walk in the Dark

By: James Round Design

U.K.

The data visualization, exploring the incredible legacy of spacewalking in its entirety, is presented in a similar structure to a constellation chart, and plots every person who has ever embarked on a spacewalk or moonwalk. I wanted the design to be in a vintage style, conjuring the timeless majesty of space, and conveying a sense of the ambition and enthusiasm around space travel that existed during the time of the moon landing and Apollo missions. The astronauts and cosmonauts are plotted chronologically according to the date of their first extravehicular activity. Different icons featuring stars, planets and other interstellar objects depict the various missions, while the scale of each icon represents the number of EVAs undertaken. Finally, EVA’s undertaken by the same person across different decades are linked to create constellations, presenting a complete picture that celebrates scientific achievement and our collective aspiration as a species to sit amongst the stars.

Third Place: Emotion Archive

By: McKinsey & Company

USA

It all started with a simple question: "How have people around the world coped with the COVID-19 crisis?" The Emotion Archive is an interactive data visualization, featured on McKinsey's COVID Response Center, that explores the reflections of 122 people in 22 cities and eight countries around the world. It offers a deeper look into how the pandemic has changed people’s lives and livelihoods while serving as an archive of the unprecedented changes and emotional responses triggered by the crisis.

First Place: Arrested Development

By: South China Morning Post

Hong Kong

The South China Morning Post graphics team chose to mark the one year anniversary of the ongoing anti-government demonstrations by visualizing the fate of those arrested on protest-related charges. Lead artist, Adolfo Arranz drew 8,981 unique silhouettes to show the number of people acquitted, discharged, bound over and convicted. The design makes clever use of the broadsheet format to show how many face prosecution, are under investigation or have been released. Readers can see at a glance that more than a quarter were female, the youngest was 11 years old, the oldest 84.

Second Place: Mohawk Maker Quarterly 16: Community

By: Hybrid Design

USA

Community as an aspiration has captured the attention of a broad cross section of the design world. As mediators of a cultural environment where we are constantly presented with everything, remarkably, we feel we are missing something. As curators of the Mohawk Maker Quarterly, and designers ourselves, we were struck by the possibility that the elusiveness of community stems from a hazy definition. Maybe we are drawn to something we haven’t fully de ned, dooming our desire to be forever unrequited. In this issue we investigate varied expressions of community with stories in three volumes: Place, Voice, Time, each representing a different point of vi
ew on community through a different point of view on design.

Third Place: MICA Commotion Vol. 08

By: Design Army

USA

The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore is one of the oldest and most prestigious art schools in the country. When approached to help find an exciting and “interactive” way to unite their 20 graduate programs, we developed and designed a semiannual magazine to connect students, alumni, faculty and prospective students. The new magazine was titled Commotion. The name comes from the belief that artists and designers create through exploration and investigation, taking inspiration from vast and varied sources; the process can be chaotic, noisy and confusing, but always rewarding. The magazine had to be visually dynamic and exciting to represent this process. We created visually exciting and compelling layouts, with bright pops of color, dynamic typography and custom illustration. The publication increased engagement and graduate enrollment and seamlessly connected the disparate groups to create a strong MICA experience that extends well beyond the college years.

First Place: Resilience Mural Project

By: Creative Theory Agency

USA

Resilience is the ability to persist and thrive in spite of challenging and unprecedented circumstances. This mural located in Washington, DC is designed to inspire our community through art and storytelling while offering resources to those affected by COVID-19. From physical to digital, this multi-layered project, in partnership with Capital One, was created to encourage perseverance through artistic expression and storytelling while providing pandemic relief resources to minority-owned businesses.

Second Place: Knit Con Event Branding

By: Hybrid Design

USA

Knit Con, [Pinterest's] annual employee conference, is designed to celebrate creativity, hands-on learning and the exploration of new skills and experiences. By focusing on the elements that tie Pinterest’s values and employees together, Hybrid Design created a fresh new take on the idea of the Pinterest Thread. Typographic expressions, illustration, art direction and photography work together to literally tie ideas together and take over the beautiful physical space that the Pinners call home. Installations throughout the Pinterest offices created the feeling of anticipation and excitement for the event to come to life and the well-deserved days of enrichment and learning for the Pinterest employees.

Third Place: Sniffing Out the Differences

By: Sniffing Out the Differences, ValueLabs

India

Sniffing out the Differences is a series of multisensory installations consisting of novel interfaces that use the unusual medium of smell along with sensor technology to narrate socially relevant stories for today. The narratives primarily deal with the modern conception of identity, and with differences which often lead to xenophobia. It consists of five installations titled Jallianwala Bagh, Identity stories, Mir Abdul Attarwala, Xeno 500, and Diversity in us. Each of these installations tackles a key social or cultural issue relevant to current society by allowing the user to experience multisensory inputs guiding them through varied narratives.

First Place: AIGA Chicago Mentorship Program 2020 Identity

By: One Design Company

USA

The AIGA Chicago Mentorship Program—one of the chapter's most successful and inclusive platforms—gives creatives from across disciplines a place to gather and share insights, experiences and resources. With programming that supports all levels of experience, the organization has collaborative mentor groups that develop a curriculum based on community interest and need. The One Design team was proud to support the program with a bold, flexible, custom typographic identity for the 2020 season—taking conceptual cues from the rich diversity of mentorship program participants.

Second Place: PRINT Award Certificates

By: Design Army

USA

Custom lettering for the 2019 Print Awards—each poster was custom for each region using various kinetic graphic elements. The certificates are oversized poster format, and were printed with white foils and inks. The goal was to create something epic and memorable for each winner, as these certificates also marked the end of the printed regional publication, and the start of a new online format. Long live PRINT!

Third Place: Confluence Chicago

By: One Design Company

USA

Collaborating with Chicago’s famed Merchandise Mart and BIFMA (the trade association for business and institutional furniture manufacturers), One Design developed a positioning strategy and brand system for Confluence Chicago, a new programming track for NeoCon 2020 (now slated to 2021) focused on bringing together creative practitioners from across multiple modes of design.

First Place: Muito Esquisito

By: Casa Rex

Brazil

Graphic design and illustrations for a children's book that creates fantastic animals—some described verbally, others visually. The illustrations move from mixing collages to simple, multicolored geometric shapes. … By combining distinct and easily identifiable body parts of animals into a single being, [they] evoke not only the fantasy of small readers but also broaden their visual representation—something that could easily be proved in the numerous school encounters in which students created their own "weird animals."

Second Place: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance

By: Journey Group

USA

The assignment was to create a pane of U.S. postage stamps to honor the Harlem Renaissance. The four literary figures honored on these stamps were chosen to highlight diverse facets of the Harlem Renaissance: writer, philosopher, educator and arts advocate Alain Locke; novelist Nella Larsen; bibliophile and historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg; and poet Anne Spencer. The stamps feature stylized pastel portraits of the four honorees based on historic photographs. The artist created each piece of art by first sketching in pencil on translucent paper. He then moved to pastel pencil on paper to make the final designs.

Third Place: Rishi Tea & Botanicals—Boxed Sachets

By: Studio MPLS

USA

Rishi Tea & Botanicals tasked us with redesigning the retail presence of their core line of tea sachets and loose-leaf teas. Offering hand-picked teas of the highest quality, and using ingredients that were globally sourced through rigorous, fair-trade practices, we knew this was not your ordinary tea. We chose to represent each flavor profile with its own unique hand-painted illustration. We created 19 original gouache paintings, inspired by the origins, ingredients and experiences of each flavor profile. Utilizing stark white as a canvas, these paintings rest on the front of each box of sachets, while blind emboss and gold foil serve to elevate the packaging above all other tea packaging in the retail category.

First P
lace: A Love Letter to Austin

By: Guerilla Suit

USA

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the midst of shelter-in-place orders citywide, Guerilla Suit asked itself how we could use our collective creative powers for good. What could we do to help our family, friends and neighbors during these most trying of times? While we were all doing our part to help flatten the curve, our small local businesses were suffering. Y'allmanac was created as a resource to help preserve our local businesses and help keep Austin Austin. When deciding how and where to spend our hard-earned dollars, we urged Austinites to eat, drink, shop, play, hire and care locally.

Second Place: BMS UNITED

By: KOMMIGRAPHICS

Greece

BMS UNITED has been active in the shipping industry since 1990, and today is one of the leading bunkering companies in the world. An important characteristic is its multinational culture, as well as its reliability, responsibility and transparency towards customers. Based on the progressive character of the company, we designed far out[side] the classic boundaries of this market. The new website of BMS UNITED presents a company that embraces diversity, is constantly evolving and always aiming to the top.

Third Place: Industry City

By: IBM Originals

USA

Much of what IBM offers is not seen with the naked eye, and therefore our clients are unaware of our expertise and solutions. We have an opportunity to present our solutions through the lens of our client—and how it will enable them to meet their customer expectations of today. This interactive experience holistically displays IBM’s breadth and depth of industry expertise and innovative technology in scenes that are familiar to the audience. The points of interest host inspiring and humanizing stories of problem solving, success through reinvention and working smarter, while also linking to our must-win solutions.

First Place: FIT 75th Anniversary Gala

By: Cynda Media Lab

USA

The FIT 75th-anniversary identity is an elegant design system that focuses on timeless design fundamentals such as balance, visual rhythm and simplicity. This design direction will fully manifest its potentials when produced with special inks and/or other high-end printing technologies to enhance the texture element in this design. For the anniversary gala, a set of Save the Date cards was designed and sent to the invited guests. These cards are printed with heavyweight matte finish paper to create the deep black, which contrasts with the bright color geometric shapes with a slight gradient treatment.

Second Place: Holiday Celebration Box Limited Edition

By: Hybrid3

USA

We designed a package for the client, Dowbuilt [a custom home builder], … a unique wood box with hidden hardware and magnetic closure … to house the gift of wine from Water-1st—a nonprofit organization that provides access to clean water and sanitation for the world's poorest people. The letterpress wrapping allows handwritten notes to recipients.

Third Place: CCD Holiday Card

By: Colin Campbell Design Inc.

Canada

As part of the promotion for my design business I like to send out an annual holiday card. The subject matter varies depending on my travels and focus during the year. This card was inspired by our trip to Nara, Japan, and features my interpretation of a caution sign in the park. The card is letterpress printed by Fox & Found Letterpress on Crane's Lettra 110 lb. cover, natural white.

First Place: Wilder Fields

By: One Design Company

USA

Wilder Fields is a technology-enabled food company producing extraordinarily flavorful, fresh, safe and sustainably grown food for local communities across the country. Harnessing bleeding-edge technology, sustainable operations and ethical real estate practices, Wilder Fields seeks to nourish the world and transform local economies by reinventing the practice of large-scale indoor vertical farming. The One Design team worked with CEO Jake Counne, CCO James Radke and their team since early 2020 to develop the Wilder Fields brand identity and communication strategy. Formerly known as Backyard Fresh Farms, a new name, positioning strategy, messaging plan, identity program and packaging system has been crafted from the ground up to express a more resonant, emotional and authentic narrative for the organization.

Second Place: Office Ours

By: One Design Company

USA

Office Ours is a series of virtual studio tours focused on the nuts and bolts of running a creative practice. Featuring an evolving roster of studios, the programming track is an opportunity to dig below the surface and see how businesses operate, evolve and thrive. One Design created and named the series. An elegant, time-keeping variable logo and classic design system came to life online and off. A digital content hub—custom built by the One Design team—served to promote upcoming events in the series, and provides access to past episodes.

Third Place: How the “Share a Little Sunshine” Logo Evolved Into “LoveFL”

By: SPARK

USA

VISIT FLORIDA’s original advocacy platform, “Share A Little Sunshine,” initially started as a campaign designed to encourage travelers to visit Florida by featuring residents who shared what they loved most about their home state as a way of extending a welcoming invitation to their out-of-state friends to come join in the fun. But after 10 years and three million pieces of content, this pool of advocates had exploded into a flourishing online community of local fans who formed a bond through their love and pride for all things Florida. … As part of our comprehensive repositioning effort, we made sure to capture the true spirit of these grateful loyalists by holding a “Sunshine Summit” attended by 30 of the most active and outspoken followers from across the state. Naturally, our intention was to start off our strategic work by listening and letting their voices not only shape the new brand, but also play an integral role in becoming a part of its ongoing success. What resulted was a total makeover of the identity, including a new logomark, color palette and identity system that accurately reflects the vibrant personality and genuine gratitude of those more than 100,000 proud Floridians eager to celebrate all the reasons why they LoveFL.

First Place: Exponential Growth of COVID-19

By: TEGNA Design Tank

USA

This summer, KUSA—a Denver-based news station—asked TEGNA Design Tank to create an animated explainer graphic to assist in describing how contagious COVID-19 can be and how infection rates are measured. The main goal of this animated piece was to explain some of the more technical aspects of disease infection rates through the use of strong visual storytelling. In order to demonstrate why social distancing amidst the outbreak of COVID-19 is so important, we made use of clean, minimalist design layouts and bold, yet gentle, colors. This motion graphics piece provides an animated representation of the scientific term known as “R naught” and details how exponential growth can (and has) occurred in the spread of the coronavirus. Our simplistic choices for symbolizing the spread of infection in conjunction with legible text queues effectively educate viewers on the significance of vaccinations and what makes COVID-19 a serious global health concern.

Second Place: REC Narrated By Christophe Pillet for Studio TK

By: Tolleson

USA

Studio TK wanted to create its first-ever video by highlighting Christophe Pillet, designer of its newest table collection, Rec. As is standard across much of the contract furniture industry, designers work with many brands. Subsequently, a simple search can return multiple videos from competing manufacturers featuring the same designer, answering the same generic questions. For Studio TK, we needed to unearth a story that went beyond just furniture, that broke from the mold of traditional designer videos and that played into the spirit of Studio TK’s human focus and social charisma. We began by interviewing Pillet over the phone and found a consistent throughline—designing for happiness—that would pair well with Studio TK’s brand and provide content rich in visual storytelling. Our original storyboards set out to capture this story utilizing in-person interviews with Christophe, plus live action b-roll of his studio in France. But then COVID hit, forcing us to completely rethink how we could tell his story without the conveniences afforded by a traditional in-person film production. With the Studio TK brand as our guide and the safety of all involved as our priority, we took this as an opportunity to challenge ourselves creatively to think beyond our original idea, and found our inspiration in stop-motion animation.

Third Place: Dreams in Fiber Optic Wood at MSK Cancer Center

By: C&G Partners

USA

The digital installations for the new David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care are designed around the feelings and needs of patients and caregivers. The main lobby hosts the welcome wall, Dreams in Fiber Optic Wood, featuring images in motion that glow directly through the wood of the building. Inspired by nature, the dreams include koi fish, butterflies, flowers and bonsai trees, all constantly changing with the

seasons. The effect is deliberately meditative and atmospheric so that it can be viewed for one minute or 100. Because light passes through thousands of actual tiny holes in the wood, a special approach was required to create the original animated sequences. Recent science has clinically proven that artistic and nature-based experiences (in medical language, “positive distractions”) can speed healing and improve outcomes. Random natural motion—like what is found in water, wind, foliage, animal life and the motion of light—has been demonstrated to hold near-universal appeal for patients in medical contexts.

First Place: I'm Feeling Myself

By: Malik Dupree

USA

“I’m Feeling Myself” Highlights the importance of self love and self care for Black Queer males who are still struggling to be themselves in a hyper masculine society. The main goal of this photo series is to let go of any and all insecurities of being a Black LGBTQ+ individual, while confidently looking into the mirror and saying "I'm feeling myself today." Whether it's putting on your favorite stylish du-rag to keep your hair kept, doing some daily skincare routine, or spending some well-deserved time with close friends, looking after your well-being as well as the state of other Black Queer folks is critical, especially now!

Second Place: 36 Days of Type

By: 80east Design

USA

[This is a] series of still-life photographs using everyday household items illustrating the 26 characters of the alphabet, and 10 numbers (zero though nine). Shown here is the master grid of all 36 images and five photographs individually. Created and posted one per day on Instagram in early 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Third Place: Where Ideas Lead

By: Design Army

USA

Promotional images to introduce Neenah's new branding tagline, “Where Ideas Lead,” positioning Neenah as a partner in the creative process that provides the products and services—the solutions—to help bring brand visions to life and transform ideas into results.

First Place: Goddess Experience Poster Series

By: Brunet-Garcia Advertising

USA

The Goddess Experience, a performance series written, directed, and performed by Ebony Payne-English, needed a cohesive set of expertly crafted promotional materials to draw attention to the project. Centered around reclaiming her experiences as a new mother and a woman of
color living with HIV, we needed to communicate both the beauty and universality of her story. Inspired by the artist’s name, we created profile silhouettes of her and her daughter from exotic ornamental ebony wood.

Second Place: Breathe and Vote

By: Rigsby Hull

USA

The AIGA Design for Democracy/League of Women Voters exhibition celebrates a century of voting rights uneasily, acknowledging that women of color didn’t gain that right until 1965. As a woman working on the project I found the discrepancy intolerable. And as a mother, I heard George Floyd’s dying plea as a call that cut across all racial lines, a petition to all mothers: “Mama, vote.” “Breathe, and vote.” Collaborating with artist Michael Ray Charles, we visualized that call on placards, church fans, banners, and in this second submission to the AIGA poster exhibition.

Third Place: Never More

By: Code Switch

USA

[This is] an anti-Trump poster inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven. I wanted us to remember what really matters this year: That we must all show up and vote the current inhabitant out of the White House. The famous phrase "Nevermore," combined with one simple yellow brush stroke, is sufficient to convey the message.

First Place: Fika Promo Package

By: PS Design

USA

Most commonly defined as “a coffee and sweets break,” Fika is a Swedish concept and a state of mind. Not just a break with some joe, but a moment to slow down and appreciate all that is good in life. Time to connect with friends and loved ones over a good cup of coffee and something sweet. After visiting Sweden this concept of Fika was one of the biggest cultural gems we took back with us. As a thank you to our clients and colleagues this year, we decided to share the ethos behind this wonderful Swedish tradition by providing them with all the “necessary” goodies so they too can experience it firsthand. The concept behind the extending type as the box opens is simple—take more time to take your pleasure seriously—a subtle nod to the famous quote from the great Charles Eames.

Second Place: Glenmore Valentine's Day Promotion: Those who print together, stay together.

By: Best Studio

Canada

Glenmore wanted to promote the fact that they are Canada's only custom tube manufacturer, as well as highlight some of their luxury printing and packaging techniques with a direct mail piece for Valentine's Day. They needed something that would speak to their core audience of designers and design agencies and be visually engaging enough for people to take notice. We created a gift set that was immediately eye-catching while highlighting several different print techniques offered by Glenmore. Each box contained three custom-designed candy-containing tubes alongside cheeky Valentine's Day cards and stickers that played up printing puns.

Third Place: Bracom Mooncake Magic Giftbox

By: Bracom Agency

Vietnam

Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as Moon Festival, is a traditional festival celebrated across many Asian countries. … In Vietnam, it is regarded as a children’s holiday, as well. On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, they parade through the streets with illuminated lanterns in different colors and shapes. The moon coming in the roundest and brightest represents a reunion. Therefore, this day is also an occasion for a family gathering. The mooncake set by Bracom, featuring the enchanting image of the moon, is highly believed to be a valuable present to show our appreciation toward friends and clients for their productive cooperation. The visualization of the autumn moon rising over a tranquil lake reminds us of putting aside the hectic life to enjoy the allure of nature for the present.

First Place: Department of Digital Remains

By: Anjali Nair, Maryland Institute College of Art

In 50 years, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook, and it will turn into a virtual graveyard. The Department of Digital Remains is a fictional federal agency that keeps a tab on all your virtual actions, which will determine your fate in the digital afterlife. In an age of immortal digital presences, this is a speculative look at what happens to our online selves after we die. This project uses design fiction to examine digital lives through the lens of digital death while trying to answer the question: If we have found ways to treat physical remains of the departed with dignity, why not digital remains?

Second Place: With Water

By: Yasmin Ali, College for Creative Studies

With Water is a brand/identity initiative that was created in direct response to Detroit's water shutoffs. Not only does it aim to provide water to people experiencing a shutoff but it aims to spread awareness and use political messaging to promote governmental change. The brand began with extensive research on Detroit's complex and nuanced water system that has left thousands of Detroiters without water. Research included looking at billing practices, the unique drainage charge, mismanagement in Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, and the neighborhoods that are most affected by these shutoffs. From our research on demographics we found that the majority of those affected by the shutoffs were Black families and that single Black mothers were hit hardest. Looking at the issue of Detroit's water system, it was clear that systemic racism had created barriers that limited access to something as basic as clean and reliable water. Reading articles and interviews it seemed as though shame had been directed at those experiencing a water shutoff rather than at the city for depriving people of water in the first place.

Third Place: Breathe

By: Akshita Chandra, Maryland Institute College of Art

Breathe is an interactive and dynamic typographic artwork of breathing type. It reminds the user to slow down and breathe along. It was created in direct response to the universal and high anxiety we all faced due to the uncertainty and change that seemed to consume us during peak lockdown. The interface with the type-able breathing typeface lets the user type out any combination of letters or words, select from a variety of five different typographic treatments, choose an ambient music to go with and meditate along! The breathing pace of the typeface is set to mimic the pace that was calming and relaxing. The artwork was coded in p5.js.

First Place: I'm Feeling Myself

By: Malik Dupree

USA

“I’m Feeling Myself” Highlights the importance of self love and self care for Black Queer males who are still struggling to be themselves in a hyper masculine society. The main goal of this photo series is to let go of any and all insecurities of being a Black LGBTQ+ individual, while confidently looking into the mirror and saying "I'm feeling myself today." Whether it's putting on your favorite stylish du-rag to keep your hair kept, doing some daily skincare routine, or spending some well-deserved time with close friends, looking after your well-being as well as the state of other Black Queer folks is critical, especially now!

Second Place: Hack(Comedy)

By: Lan Zhang

USA

The word "hack" has many meanings. In the computer programming realm, "hack" is known as an act of gaining or attempting unauthorized access to a network or computers. However, this term is also long established in the comedy industry, referring to materials copied from original comedians. My native language isn't English, and I struggled to become culturally competent in American society, where humor is also a crucial cultural pedestal. With my design background and programming ability, I started my design research in decoding the secrets behind becoming fluent in the comedy language. "Hack(Comedy)" is a computational comedy net art interface and a net art performance. "Hack(Comedy)" aims to interrogate our perception of humor through live procedural text generations that reflect the American comedy landscape's condensed themes and identities.

Third Place: SOF | Sisters Overpowering Fibroids

By: Hamda Al Naimi

USA

SOF is an acronym for Sisters Overpowering Fibroids. To translate the core of the brand identity, it was essential to use a simple name that embodies strength and support. Consequently, the goal is to bridge the gap between people diagnosed with uterine fibroids, their doctors, as well as creating a safe and supportive space. SOF aims to encourage and empower patients to be in charge of their health through multiple design deliverables. SOF is a concept project inspired by the design
er’s journey with uterine fibroids, the frustration of being handed the same generalized brochure after a doctor's visit, meeting women in similar positions who have waited too long to get treated. While not dangerous, ignoring the symptoms can lead to complications. Possible solutions involve creating a sense of urgency, giving patients enough personalized information and a support system.

And the world of visual culture is all the better for it.

Case in point: His personal project “A Walk in the Dark,” a data visualization that captures every spacewalk ever undertaken—beginning with the groundbreaking March 1965 Voskhod 2 extravehicular activity (EVA) pulled off by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov.

“Six decades later, EVAs are more commonplace but no less impressive,” as Round writes. Last year, “Jessica Meir became the 232nd person to brave open space—a pioneer in her own right, as part of the first all-female EVA, working alongside Christina Koch to repair batteries on the ISS, and preserve the future of humanity’s first permanent residence off Earth.”

To commemorate the sum toll of years of scientific achievement and human bravery, Round’s data viz mimics the structure of a constellation chart, mapping every person who took those legendary bold steps beyond their vehicles.

“I wanted the design to be in a vintage style, conjuring the timeless majesty of space, and conveying a sense of the ambition and enthusiasm around space travel that existed during the time of the moon landing and Apollo missions,” Round details.

The results are beautiful—and they are by no means the limits of Round’s cosmic explorations.

To wit:

The Most Vertical Person on Earth

“A long-form infographic exploring the inspiring career of astronaut and deep sea explorer Kathryn Sullivan.”

The Falcon and the Dragon

“Celebrating the historic launch of SpaceX Demo-2, an incredible moment for the future of spaceflight.”

Cosmic Calls

“Exploring humanity’s attempts at messaging extraterrestrial civilizations.”

The ISS: The First 50 Expeditions

“Celebrating the brave and inspiring individuals who called the International Space Station home over a period of 16 years.”

The Many Moons of Jupiter

“Mapping all of Jupiter’s 79 known moons, the result of over 400 years of Jovian discovery.”

Here’s to those who walk among the stars—and the designers who help bring such incredible feats into perspective on the page.

It’s both intensely personal and strikingly universal—she catalogues last hangs with friends; the last time she was in the office; the dawn of omnipresent hand sanitizer; the moment she accepted that she had to set up a longterm home office; and on and on.

As Lupi writes, “Design wise, I would normally go for richer and denser visuals, with many more data layers. This time I wanted to focus on a story that we could all possibly relate to. ⁣

⁣⁣

“It is—unfortunately—particularly timely right now, as we are faced with a possible new lockdown season, fearing to lose control over our lives again. But it can also be a reminder that there is hope, there will be new ‘firsts’ when the conditions allow it, and that time flows and passes even if it doesn’t necessarily feel like it.⁣⁣”

Check out the work below.

Images: Pentagram

While living in Oregon, he was prone to getting lost. So, as the legend goes, “The best way to get un-lost is to draw a map, and when he drew a circular map of Portland, Archie’s Press was born.”

In the years since, Archambault has brought visual life to numerous cities and states. Comprehensive human anatomy, from the eye to the ear to, yes, all parts below. Planets. The Zodiac. Beer. Cheese. Tacos.

No matter what he designs, he distills, making his subject matter not only digestible, but damn beautiful. He letterpresses his work with a hearty 600 pounds of pressure, leaving an impression that will indeed last a lifetime.

Why are we riffing on Archambault today?

As we reported last week, the MTA has released a fantastic live Subway map. There are die-hard adherents to the map’s various static incarnations over the years—but to be honest, while we love us some Vignelli and Hertz, it’s Archambault’s that we’d hang on our wall.

Here’s a bit about his thinking behind the design:

So there’s a lot to unpack here.

My main thesis was to explain the Big Picture of the subway system, describing the general arrangement of the system. This is probably more useful/endearing to a person who has used the subway a lot. I conceived this about six months after moving to the city, when I still had the eyes of a newcomer, but the knowledge of a regular passenger. I’ve been working on it obsessively for hours at a time, for about four years.

The Strategy: Strip away individual stops and keep everything referring to two things:

1. The terminus/direction of each train line.Often, the directions for each train are referred to by their last stops. For instance, BDFN & Q trains all have Coney Island/Stillwell Ave as one of their directions. If you don't know what that means, it helps to see, highlighted, CONEY ISLAND/STILLWELL AVE. You’ll see this a lot on the signs in the subway, so it’s nice to know what it refers to. It means “South Brooklyn direction.”

2. The street that each line follows. There’s a disconnect between the subway, underground, and “reality” aboveground. We exist to live aboveground, not underground, so I felt having a little knowledge about where the underground paths take you can give you some more agency over your experience in the subway. Some lines do not follow a logical street so I didn’t name them.

There are a few major junctions that spit train lines around in wild directions. Downtown, comprised of several intricate junctions, looks like a knot diagram with all the lines slithering around one another. Adding to the vortex is the jump from Downtown Manhattan to Downtown Brooklyn, where the trains are swirled around again. It’s pointless to memorize this on a map. The one note I liked to add was “where” in Downtown Manhattan the trains end up. There’s a higher and lower part of downtown around the Financial District and the other around Canal Street.

It’s always alarming when visitors say, “I'm taking the Yellow Line to (someplace).” Oof, you’re in trouble. The colors of the subways do not indicate much, except for [a] portion of track between 14th St. and 42nd St. where they follow along the same street. Then they explode in dozens of different directions, disconnecting and reconnecting illogically. I found this to be sort of distracting so I removed the colors on the most current version.

Finally, Archambault notes that the map remains “very unfinished”—and encourages you to email your suggestions to him.

In the meantime, you can order a digital print of the latest version here.

So how do you meaningfully update something that has not received a significant redesign in four decades?

You simply make it work better.

Blending the clarity of Massimo Vignelli’s layout, the geography of Michael Hertz Associates and an infusion of the 21st century, Work & Co partnered with the MTA and the Transit Innovation Partnership on a pro-bono project to improve the lives of New Yorkers.

The map, simply dubbed the Live Subway Map, is now live in beta. Accessible without the need for a download, it provides real-time route data so commuters can get where they’re going faster than ever before. (Hey, if you’re going to have to wait an extra 18 minutes for the train, at least the new map takes the hair-pulling guesswork out of the equation.)

“We saw an opportunity to help New York City by building a tool appropriate for our time,” says Felipe Memoria, founding partner at Work & Co. “As designers, we admire the history of the MTA’s legendary printed maps, but technology enables us to create something more powerful. We are laying the foundation for transit systems around the world to adopt real-time maps that further encourage the use of public transportation.”

Following a process that ultimately took 18 months, the map debuts in a city that was hit hard by COVID-19, making it an essential asset for efficiently navigating public spaces.

All told, the new map offers train tracking in real time; line updates about out-of-service trains and one-way traffic; zoom functionality that allows easy reference of subway entrances, station names and the streets aboveground; detailed info on accessibility, from elevators to escalators; and emergency alerts.

Given the iconic nature of the original maps and the significance of any updates, Gary Hustwit—the filmmaker behind design documentaries including Helvetica, Objectified and more—documented the development process.

Check his short film out below.

In honor of Labor Day 2012, let’s take a look at Labor Day 1882 and beyond. According to the U.S. Department of Labor:

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

The form that the observance and celebration of Labor Day should take were outlined in the first proposal of the holiday—a street parade to exhibit to the public “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations” of the community, followed by a festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families.

Since then, labor has been celebrated in many ways, not the least is through the arts. The arts have promoted the nobility, struggles, triumphs and importance of labor in the United States. The documentary organization Labor Arts (located at the Bobst Library NYU, 70 Washington Square South, 10th Floor) is a resource for all things labor (including the images here). It was created in 2000 by Donald Rubin, Evelyn Jones Rich, Moe Foner (1915–2002), Henry Foner, Esther Cohen, Rachel Bernstein and Debra E. Bernhardt (1953–2001), with “skilled help” from Ami Palombo, Keri A. Myers, Jeff Watt, Keith Bush, Angela Powell, Milton Glaser and others. The virtual archives are well worth exploring.

LABOR ARTS is a work in progress—a virtual museum designed to gather, identify and display examples of the cultural and artistic history of working people and to celebrate the trade union movement’s contributions to that history. We invite you to become involved in this exciting project by giving us your suggestions about resources, collections and exhibitions that we can include on our website.

They have redesigned fellow data aficionado Andrew Cuomo’s ubiquitous PowerPoint slides. They’ve launched Happy Data to bring an infusion of positivity to our feeds. They’ve infused figures with life—and, well, that’s kind of at the heart of what has been driving Lupi for years.

Yesterday, Lupi released a passion project created with her team at Pentagram, and Accurat. The group partnered with the COVID-19 Technology Task Force—a volunteer body that explores and proposes potential life-saving solutions to policymakers—to produce a data visualization showcasing how tech can greatly assist contact tracing. Traditionally, contact tracing is a labor-intensive process that involves manually calling all of the people who may have come into contact with someone who has the virus.

The overarching strategy takes the form of an app dubbed Health Department Exposure Notification (EN). Privacy has been a concern for many when it comes to contact tracing, so EN does its work without utilizing GPS or recording individual locations. Rather, when users of the app come in proximity of each other, the app makes a private and secure note and establishes a “beacon,” and later cross-references a user’s data against the rest of the beacons to see if you’ve potentially been exposed to the virus. People can thus self-isolate earlier, and halt the spread.

It’s easy to get wordy in describing the complex concept—and that’s where Pentagram and Accurat come in.

“The visualization needed to be memorable, visually arresting and immediately understandable for busy policymakers in government who were the Covid-19 Technology Task Force’s intended audience,” the crew writes. “The design team began by creating a hypothetical scenario of disease spread, and placing that scenario on a vertical timeline. Three undulating ribbons serve as memorable and accessible metaphors for the primary actors in the scenario: an infected person who installs the exposure notification app, a person who becomes infected and does not have the app, and then a person who self-quarantines as a result of receiving a notification that they may have come in contact with a sick person.

“A major goal of the visualization was to connect this complicated and often opaque technological process to real-life behavior and events. Small dots are used to represent other individuals who may have been in contact with the three primary ribbons, and whether they’ve become infected. Captions throughout add further narrative context, clearly underlining how exposure notification can save lives.”

As the virus continues to surge, it’s hard to argue against embracing every possible solution at our disposal. And now, at least, one of them isn’t hard to visualize.

How are the skies above you different?

How has your cell phone usage evolved?

The Spanish design studio Errea Communicación, based in Pamplona, knows.

For the past 50 days of quarantine, Errea has been collecting data and publishing a visualization in the newspaper Diario de Navarra. The nine staffers at the firm effectively act as representatives of their fellow citizens in lockdown and bring vibrant life to a medley of relatable datasets. Sometimes cheeky, sometimes somber, the figures offer a mirror of our collective experience.

“Infographics, one of our specialties, is a hybrid genre that encompasses and is adaptable to almost any subject,” the firm writes. “Above all, we view it as a tool at the service of people, in a way similar to the concept of ‘data humanism,’ so ably developed by noted designer Giorgia Lupi. We are convinced that overwhelming displays of data are quite often useless if they are not linked to emotions. Data can and should tell stories that connect with people, and if it does not, then it is nothing more than pure, cold statistics.”

All told, Errea’s Quarantine Visual Album is a time capsule of the micro and macro.

Don’t speak Spanish? Don’t worry. As the studio’s work proves, data truly transcends language.

“Bumper Cars”—one family’s overlapping movements within a 968-square-foot apartment. (Two adults, three children.)

The spread of the virus (in red) on the front page of the Diario de Navarra across three months—January, February and March.

Every bird that passed by one window during a 12-hour timespan—1,368 appearances by 16 different species (the heavy yellow concentration is blackbirds).

The Errea Communicación team’s mobile usage during the first 19 days of quarantine—19,570 minutes total, broken down by app.

The air traffic above Pamplona on a single day in April 2020, and one year earlier—42 planes vs. 648.

Sleep patterns during quarantine and before—roughly the same amount, though the quality has diminished.

A catalog of virtual travel via video calls.

What beverages each Errea Communicación staffer has consumed in volume, and by category—soda (purple), coffee (brown), milk (cream), water (blue), juice (peach), blends (green), wine (maroon), beer (gold), liquor (black).

Images: Errea

And even if you don’t live in New York, you’ve probably heard about his co-star: his trusty PowerPoint slide deck, decked out in New York’s blues (Pantone 288C and 3005C, respectively) and Proxima Nova and Arial, per New York state’s graphic standards.

Cuomo has a history with public PowerPoints. As The New York Times wrote of his 82-slide gubernatorial debut back in 2011, “If Governor Cuomo’s State of the State address on Wednesday is any guide, he could be remembered one day for elevating that overused tool of middle managers and college professors to the exalted place in public life once reserved for soaring oratory.”

Cuomo’s COVID-19 presentations have been universally praised, and Inc. magazine even used them as the framework for a business how-to article.

Though clip art occasionally makes an appearance, aesthetically, they’re not all that bad—but Pentagram data maestro Giorgia Lupi, Sarah Kay Miller and Phillip Cox experimented to see how design might make them even more effective.

As Pentagram writes, “Even with their appreciation for the governor’s approach, the designers saw the potential to improve the visualizations of his slide deck to more effectively and vividly communicate these important statistics. They wanted to inject more nuance, context and humanity into the governor’s various graphs and charts, without sacrificing the exactitude the public has come to depend on.”

Lupi and her team began by identifying what makes the presentations so effective: legibility and simplicity. The issue is that in the quest for simplicity, some critical information—and valuable insights—are easily overlooked.

They sought to bring these additional data sets and facts to life, and also redesigned three key recurring elements of the press conferences: the bar graph of hospitalizations, the death toll, and the rate of infection diagram. Moreover, “The designers also created a new visualization for COVID-19 tests given versus positive diagnoses. As testing becomes more prevalent across the state, they wanted to imagine what this graph should look like.”

Ultimately, “the designers believe this work is a meaningful starting point for more successful data visualizations. … They hope this project begins a conversation about the role of information design in crises such as these, and will continue to iterate on this work as more feedback is collected from the field.”

Here are the results of their experiments thus far:

Bodkin does all the preliminary sketching by hand on miniature page templates (or full-size tracing paper called flimsies) that are then translated into fully composed digital pages. “When I break from tradition, as I did on these pages,” he told me, “I’m careful that the departures are substantively driven, that they are made to convey an important message, and that the drama they create is proportionate to gravity of the news being expressed.”

These are a few examples of COVID-19 fronts that he believes have best conveyed the story over the past few weeks. There are some subtle breakthroughs too, including the March 27 chart that illustrates how unemployment numbers have risen so drastically, and the dramatic spike into the nameplate on April 8 (the first time that a graphic ever appeared above the dateline into the logo) showing where the largest concentration of cases can be found in the USA: New York City.

The New York Times front page is, however, more than a record of the day and an announcement of another building block of history—it is what determines how one feels about the world, if only until the next revelation rolls along.

The futurist design thinker Buckminster Fuller was also present at the Fair but had not met the newly arrived Sutnar. During the late 1920s and the early 1930s, Fuller made a reputation based, in part, on his novel, aerodynamically designed prototypes of experimental vehicles first called “4D Transport,” and later renamed “Dymaxion,” a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, tension. “The visionary inventor had the ambition to develop an ‘Omni Medium Transport,’ a vehicle that could go anywhere, anytime. His imagined land-sea-air mobiles revolutionized human mobility by envisaging intelligent transportation decades before such ideas would be considered realizable. Fuller’s approach also radicalized the philosophical concepts of human freedom, choice and interconnectivity,” writes Van Woensel.

Sutnar and Fuller did, however, eventually meet and collaborated on Transport: Next Half Century (1951–2000), initially financed and produced for the Canterbury Printing Co. as a promotional sample. The realist American painter Philip Pearlstein, who then worked in Sutnar’s studio, was assigned to render the sketches for printing. Pearlstein describes the book’s design as very radical at that time. They also included the sketches of Sutnar’s first son, Ctislav, an aviation engineer, and Fuller’s text addressed his “Dymaxion” designs and concepts. “The lesser-known objective of Transport was to revive the popularity of Fuller’s work among American audiences, which it indirectly did,” adds Van Woensel.

Transport shows a slew of aerodynamic, intelligent machines, mobiles and flying objects in Sutnar’s signature design, accurately predicting the evolution of human mobility. Through Transport, Fuller promoted “his philosophically charged worldview as a globally interconnected, ever-accessible desynchronized parallel plain.” To obtain a copy of the book, write to curator.janvanwoensel@gmail.com.

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