This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 7:25 pm and is filed under News, Media, Art, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Slide into Chaos
I am dazzled by simple displays of bright colors. I noticed when a colorful chart making the rounds in the news several weeks ago showed Iraq moving from Peace toward Chaos. The slide shows by arrows how much closer to chaos the situation was within a week. This was nearly three weeks ago, so I’m sure it is even closer now.
What continues to interest me is finding that this slide comes up in other interesting places. I’m clearly not the only one who notices when dazzling gradients show up in the news. Actually, most of the notice was not about the chaos in Iraq but about the chaotic information of the slide. (See full slide at the New York Times for the full effect.)
One design blog (from the creators of the great project management program, Basecamp) wondered whether the slide would be noticed by Edward Tufte. I wondered this, too! Tufte, the author of Visual Display of Quantitative Information, continues to be a topic of conversation among my friends and family, including one who took Tufte’s design classes at Yale. As it turns out, Tufte posted the image to his own blog (or blog-like complete mess of information. Surely, of all people, Tufte could have a more accessible design for his blog?).
Doesn’t it makes sense to convey chaos with chaos?
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