Skewing Truth With Design

Dartmouth College Political Scientists recently released a report saying that infographics might be the best way to alter peoples beliefs about a particular subject. More specifically, they were looking at two items, 1. "people tend to resist unwelcome information", and 2. "whether graphical corrections may be more effective than text" at changing peoples minds. What they found: "Graphical corrections are also found to successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistant subjects and to perform better than an equivalent textual correction."

Well, duh! Designers have known this for decades. This is how we get you to buy a coke, think Target clothes are cool and convince you to buy a product you don't need. Design is a visual solution to deliver information. However, when that information is handled poorly or in a misleading manner it becomes propaganda.

Bloomberg's Businessweek created a nice example of how easy it is to visually skew non-related data to mislead consumers into false conclusions. These are pretty funny but they do illustrate a real truth of how design could transform into propaganda.



One of my favorite books dealing with this issue is by Edward R Tufte. In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Tufte deals extensively with the propensity of designers to unknowingly (or knowingly) skew data when compiling it visually. Trying to make data fun or decorative lends itself to creating propaganda if the information is not properly cared for and treated with great respect.





Tufte goes into great detail along with real world examples of how data should be treated and displayed to attain the most unbiased positions possible. An obvious must read for anyone creating infographics, but more importantly a must read for anyone who is interested in being able to recognize false information and disseminate the truth.

Obviously people look at graphics before digging into text. We are visual creatures. The old example was a newspaper - have you ever read the entire thing, or just flipped through to find something interesting? Now its, do you read all the text on all the websites you visit - or just look for something interesting and then dig in? Why does a book have a fancy cover and not simply the first page of text from the book?

A better study for Dartmouth might have been to calculate the percentage of false information that is communicated through misleading graphics instead of trying to decide if design works.

Sans-Serif For President?!?

With the upcoming election just 16 months away, the public is about to be littered with poorly designed political posters and propaganda from Local and State Government to the GOP Presidential candidates and then the final showdown.

I decided to take a look back through the last 13 election cycles, beginning with Kennedy's campaign in 1960. Spanning the course of over 50 years, these campaigns existed through a tremendous time of technological growth - yet overall it seems that there has been little to no growth design wise. While there are seemingly endless variations of each design for a single campaign, this article will attempt to review the most generic versions of the winners. I omitted a few evaluations that I did like Stacked names vs. Side-by-side, All caps vs. Mixed Case, Justified Alignment vs. Offset, Slogan vs. No Slogan and many other obscure analysis points - with the hope of not making this thing overwhelming.



While there are some interesting similarities here I would not be an advocate of actually using this as a design guideline unless you wanted to create, as I mentioned, a very "boring" poster. It would be nice to see some innovation in this space.

Obviously a campaign actually #winning is not based solely on signage design. However, as with any brand I believe that to the degree at which professionalism is exhibited there is at the very minimum a subconscious impact - just as any product branding would have. With so many other factors at play in a campaign; policy debates, voting records, current issues and events - a cohesively designed campaign would only be necessary checkbox of done correctly. We saw Obama's campaign dominate in this space in the last cycle - probably as the first candidate who's campaign actually understood branding and how it should extend across all efforts, especially through social media.

A polar opposite of this would be the 1988 Dukakis-Bentsen campaign featuring blue text on top of a flag… If a student or employee of mine in all seriousness showed me a design like this I would fail or fire them. Also, I love that the 2000 Gore-Liberman showcased the iconic dot com "Swoosh" - classy.

As one last bonus I couldn't help but tossing in this poster from the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. While it might make a fun t-shirt I can't imagine who actually thought this was good bumper sticker design. Unless I know sign language, I would have no idea who this sticker was for - and that is assuming I always carry binoculars in my car to read bumper stickers with tiny, detailed line art.



Perhaps once I have a substancial number of 2012 campaign posters I will post them and do a little analysis/prediction for fun based on their design alone.

The Tech Bubble

Nice graphic from G+

Contemporary Nursery Design In Progress

Based on Dwell Studio's Skyline Bedding. Final photos to come once the room design is complete. Photos by Kerry Pickrell.