Today, especially in business, the term “Big Data” is being thrown around more and more. In our digital culture so much can be recorded, quantified, plotted, mapped, calculated, etc. We have no shortage of data but we are often left with a shortage of understanding. According to Wikipedia, Data Visualization is “is the study of the visual representation of data, meaning “information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information“. 

In short, data visualization helps us understand “big data” by showing relationships in the data visually.

Here is a wonderful example of data visualization at work.

If I told you that New York’s City’s carbon footprint was 54,349,650 tons a year = 148,903 tons a day = 6,204 tons an hour = 1.72 tons a second, would you think that is a lot? It does sound like a lot but without visualizing the data it is hard to understand what those numbers represent. The video below illustrates the point beautifully.

National Geographic is known for having some of the most spectacular photography around. They offer a broad range of photography to inspire your next project from photos of global cultures to amazing shots of the natural world. I find that just browsing the collection gives me ideas for layouts, color palettes and more. All of the images below are available here as desktop wallpaper. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Erik Spiekermann speaks to Elliot Jay Stocks about how typography is used in the digital domain and what digital designers can learn from traditional print techniques. Enjoy!

In 2008 as Barack Obama began his campaign for President of The United States, something incredible happened… actually several incredible things happened. For the first time in history, Barack Obama’s campaign and his Design Director Scott Thomas made graphic design a differentiator in a presidential election. Scott Thomas, AKA Simple Scott, described working on the graphic identity for Obama’s campaign as building an airplane while in flight.

Soon, BarackObama.com was sporting a startlingly beautiful design. Campaign signs, mobile apps, buttons, posters, emails, etc. were all speaking the same clean, crisp, hopeful, american design language. In my opinion, graphic design helped Barack Obama win the election. Politics aside, it is hard to argue with the fact that Obama ran one of the best online campaigns in history with moving videos, well crafted emails and a great website designed to move supporters to action and more.

Today, the WhiteHouse.Gov website looks like it retains much of Simple Scott’s design language. Obama’s 2012 campaign seems to have lacked the visual elegance of his 2008 campaign and I would wager that Simple Scott was not the design director.

I highly recommend Scott Thomas’ book, Designing Obama. It is a great walk-through of the process of designing Obama’s campaign.

I also recommend the video below:

Scott Thomas: Designing the Obama Campaign from 99U on Vimeo.

Like most rabid Apple fans, I immediately checked Apple’s website after viewing a live stream of the iPhone 5 media event. The page loaded with lightning quickness and I was struck by something really interesting. Radical simplicity. The page basically has four elements. The navigation bar, the iPhone 5 picture, two lines of copy (just 11 words, just 50 characters), and two video thumbnails with captions. That is it.

So, I got curious. I took some screenshots of some other major smart-phone website and I was stunned by the complexity. More generally, many people see the simplicity of iOS as a weakness. With Android you can customize quite a bit more and the interface is more detailed and dense, both visually and in terms of interaction perhaps. However, I think Apple’s simplicity is a massive strength. A single minded focus on what is important…the big idea…is all you need. What do you think? Which smart-phone OS do you like best and why? Does Apple’s homepage serve its purpose? Is it missing something important?

This presentation is an absolute must see. Ken Robinson is one of my favorite authors and he is an expert on creativity.

From the TED website:

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

In part one of this post I wrote about one of Disney’s first Imagineers, creative genius John Hench, and how he drew inspiration from the many volumes of diverse magazines and books he consumed. However, this was not his only source of inspiration. In the early days after Walt Disney Land was built, Hench says that Walt Disney himself used to tell his designers and engineers to spend time in the park as guests. Disney wanted them to experience the park for themselves and observe the other guests and how they moved around the park. Essentially, he wanted them to be a kind of anthropologist and study the guests so that they could design better rides, signage, walkways, shows, gift shops and more.

In his book “Designing Disney: Imagineering And The Art Of The Show” Hench wrote:

“When Disney first opened, we embarked on an ongoing learning process about our guests and how they respond to a story environment. For example, just after the parked opened for business, we discovered that some of the guests had made a pathway through a flower bed. We were walking through the park one morning before opening when the gardeners came up to Walt and said, “We need a fence to keep guests out of the flower bed.” Walt told them, “No, we must pave this pathway. When guests make their own path, the probably have a damn good reason for doing it.” From experiences such as these, we learned that our guests make the park’s story environment their own.”

This proves that Walt Disney (one of the best creative genius’ of all time) and John Hench (another incredible creative mind who designed much of Walt Disney Land and Walt Disney World in Orlando) believed that great ideas don’t always come purely from inside one’s own mind with no external input. Instead, great ideas are born of insight garnered from observation and research.

Another great company, design and innovation consulting firm IDEO, believes in this deeply. In his book “The Ten Faces Of Innovation”, IDEO general manager Tom Kelly writes about the “Anthropologist” as a key role within an organization in the art of innovation. It’s also the reason that IDEO has what it calls a “human centered design philosophy”. By this logic, the only way to create good design is to first understand the human beings that will interact with it.

Before you start your next design project or marketing initiative take some time to observe and study your audience in their natural habitat and you might surprised what innovations their behavior reveals to you.

As we work on creating our guide to online marketing resources I wanted to share a few of the items that will make the cut. Enjoy!

http://michaelhyatt.com

This is an amazing blog about leadership, blogging, social media, marketing and a whole lot more. Michael also has a wide range of easily understandable advice for first time bloggers. Michael’s amazing new book “Platform” is a great guide to building an online communications platform that will get noticed.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Smashing Magazine is a mega-blog about graphic design, web design, coding, user experience design and more. I have learned a ton about best practices from this site.

http://abduzeedo.com

Wow, this site is full of incredible imagery and designs to inspire your next head turning project.

http://www.copyblogger.com/blog/

If you write…and especially if you write for a living, you need to read this blog. This site is number 5 on Ad Age’s Power 150 list of top marketing blogs.

http://www.fastcodesign.com

This is one of the best blogs that covers both business and design/innovation. Fast Co. Design is a great way to stay on the cutting edge of design news.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

Leonardo da Vinci

I had a great conversation with a wise colleague yesterday. He was telling me about how he had been with his company for over 30 years and how he had seen many ups and downs. He was in sales at a senior level and was telling me the key to selling any product…simplicity. He said “marketing is about those three or four things! It’s not about the 102 features of benefits of the product!”. He reminded me that the human brain can only absorb so much information much less retain it throughout a person’s busy and hectic life. He joked that you have to repeat those three or four key benefits to the market until you want to puke from hearing them.
The best marketing messages are simple and clear. Sticky marketing messages are especially critical for a new product launch. Let’s take Apple’s iPhone launch as an example. The iPhone had literally hundreds of features, tons of apps, and lots of reasons to buy that Steve Jobs could have spent hours and hours ruminating about. Instead, he chose a few key features displayed on wonderfully minimalist slides to tell the story. He introduced the iPhone as a widescreen iPod touch, a phone and a revolutionary internet communications device. That’s it!
In my opinion, simplicity is one of the most important factors in effective marketing communications. Chip & Dan Heath’s book “Made To Stick” does a marvelous job of fleshing out the other factors of messages that stick in someone’s brain. I highly recommend the book, not only for marketers but for anyone that must communicate a message (so everyone on the planet mostly!). The book uses the acronym SUCCESs to communicate that a sticky message should be simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and have a story. I also apply this model to crafting PowerPoint presentations both from a content and visual perspective.
So the next time you sit down to plan a product launch campaign or ad campaign, simplify your message. Think about even simplifying the language you use. Pick three incredible benefits and talk about those until the message can’t help but sink in.

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” –Steve Jobs

Earning the opportunity to design an olympic logo is the project of a lifetime for any agency or designer. Litterally, the whole world will see your work. However, this amazing opportunity comes with an almost impossible task. How do you represent a people, a culture, a city and an entire nation with one iconic image? Well, Brazilian design agency Tatil Design de Ideias has done just that with their design for the Rio 2016 Olympics logo. See the video below for a brief look at their process.