Information is a tricky subject to deal with. As a visual person I can find myself getting lost in pain text information and not really understand the significance behind it. Once numbers hit a certain point I switch off and find it hard to comprehend the magnitude of them.
For instance, the Iraq war cost an estimated $3000 billion. What does that mean? I can’t understand what 3000 billion is but when I think about it in these terms I get closer. If a million was converted into seconds it would be 12 days but if a billion was converted into seconds it would 31 years! This helps to come closer to understanding but is still quite a dry way of looking at information. David McCandless calls himself a ‘data journalist’ and he understands how we need visuals to understand the information around us. Our current lifestyle mean we are constantly being feed information or data glut as David puts it, and it’s hard for us to take all this data in. However, through visualising the information we can start to see the patterns and connections that matter. Look at David’s ‘The Billion Dollar-o-Gram’. Suddenly $3000 billion make sense.
Think about our own planet. How large is it? The circumference is 40,075.017 km but again, what does that mean? It could be a random collection of numbers for all I understand. But when I watch a visualization of the size of our solar system I begin to understand how very tiny our planet actually is.
I have been thinking about this recently because Knifedge is going through a rebrand and one of our biggest issues is how do we communicate all our offerings without overloading people. A simple solution would be to use a diagram and lay it out for all to see. Obviously this isn’t a new idea, it’s been done before but it is tricky to get right. Look at AirSide’s ‘What we do…’ diagram. It’s overwhelming and a bit confusing, too many colours. But look at Australian based consultancy Folk’s ‘What we do…’ diagram. it’s clean and clear, they break it down into three offerings that all have three sub-offerings. Simple. Information can quite often be hard to digest and breaking it down and laying it out visually can be an easy and quick solution to this.
