It started when I was very young. I had this very high IQ score in something called quantitative reasoning. My family thought it was going to be Math, but it wasn’t. It was the ability to synthesize a lot of information and come to a conclusion. (Paula Scher)
Translating Action into Design
You’ve probably seen Paula Scher’s work without realizing it. Whether hidden in plain sight at The Public Theater in New York, across a sundry of album covers, or in buildings, Paula’s use of typography sets her apart. In the 1990’s, it was her work with The Public and Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk that made the style of active, crazy text a thing.
A thing in fact that went everywhere…This look became the look of theatre throughout the rest of the ’90’s and even beyond. It’s rare to start a trend, but some people do. To me, what’s fascinating about Paula is how she talks about her work in the Netflix documentary, Abstract. She describes building out her textual identities like so:
It’s the act of weaving little bits of information to make a bigger thing.
That sounds familiar…How often do we make charts and weave them into dashboards?
Paula works between concepts and bringing that concept into lettering, pushing further and further into abstraction to echo what she wants to bring forward. The whole documentary follows her through the creation of a few identities, including Pier 55. How she approaches her work feels rather familiar. She abstracts the world, putting forth echoes of what she knows and experiences. We do this too, by drawing in the familiar and limiting the focus on key elements.
A call to older style maps.
I generally want to push something as far as it can be pushed. For me, that’s the fun.
We can seek inspiration from the real world and beyond for our ideas. We can use metaphor, a topic Lilach Manheim is covering heavily in her Tableau talk at TC18 this year. This pushes us to make data relatable, usable, and beautiful.
Lasers, lights, sound!
It started when I was very young. I had this very high IQ score in something called quantitative reasoning. My family thought it was going to be Math, but it wasn’t. It was the ability to synthesize a lot of information and come to a conclusion…and I was happiest when I was making things.
If there was ever a documentary that mirrored my sentiments toward design, this is it. Call this quote my excuse for not doing math homework in school. As analysts, we often get seen as mathy. Yet, dashboard design also requires leveraging visual communication techniques to give life to the patterns we find in numbers. In fact, that’s the crux of it. We may be fluent in the nuances of and shifts in the numbers, but we’re often alone in that regard. Most users of our work have another job, making our ability to synthesize and provide digestible conclusions essential.
What’s impressive is watching her work. She’s sketching in cabs, constantly on the move between desks, and pulling inspiration from everywhere. A part of her magic is capturing the essence of a particular idea, such as the dance movements from Bring in ‘da Noise. She watched the dance movements and brought them to life in her work. Another, a logo, echoes the dockyard she wants to capture.
When we bring the real world into our dashboards, it can be literal:
Or it can call to the action we want to support:
Great, we get the art part…how about the action part?
I have an overall plan about how I’d approach work. Some of it is strategic and some of it is intuitive. The strategic part is absorbing information from the client. I want to understand why they look the way they look. You’re not changing somebody; you’re making them a more perfect vision of where they started.
Follow Your Users
Don’t stalk them, but ride with them. Understand their world. Get into their head. Intern for a day and attempt to understand their work, their problems, and what your work is supposed to do to help them. This is that translate or absorb part – it’s far from literal, but conceptual. Humans do well with experiential learning. It’s why, no matter how hard you try, kids have to try that trick that will toss them over the handlebars at least once. Let’s hope it’s in the yard.
As we navigate our users world, we see what competes with our analysis. Do they have to explore our dashboard in between spurts of phone calls and other random pop-up work? Do they need to have other tools open at the same time? Paula’s work on Funk resonated because she captured the movement, the versatility, and the noise. How do we bring recognition of the environment and constellation of needs into our work? Can we embed or use actions to integrate other tools (consider QA on SalesForce or adding commentary to charts). Can our charts follow their logic and natural lines of questions?
What I love about Paula’s view is how she takes a very interpretive approach. She sees and gets where they are, distills what they hope to achieve, and brings forth life from the stems of prior work. She creates a visual language, one that can be recognized immediately.
The job is to traverse the different roads and try to get either an individual, a group of people, or a whole corporation to be able to see.
Bring only what’s needed
To often, we try to make things for everybody. We tack on extra bits to try to accommodate everyone, when simplicity often achieves more. Paula is an expert at this. You can see this when she takes the essence of Citibank and Travelers to make the combined Citi identity. You can see where various drafts from feedback attempt to add more – a literal umbrella in several cases – when it keeps coming back to the simpler version.
The job was never really the design of the logo, it’s persuading a million people to use it.
As designers ourselves, we see this. We’ll find simple ways of doing things and design accordingly quickly, efficiently, and effectively and spend most of our time convincing others that this will work. We support, teach, and adapt. We revise, revert, and edit further. We monitor, breaking off pieces to different analyses, and encourage further trimming.
They want proof that this is really, really gonna work. The problem is there isn’t proof. It’s how do people see and perceive and accept things.
Imagining the Possibilities
Business teaches us to be risk-averse and to limit our trust in others. John Locke would tell you the trust part of this is counter to our nature and essential for operating as a society. When we seek novel approaches, we want the fearless person that’s fascinated by venturing into unexplored plains. But, it’s also important to trust this person.
Our response to new and exciting things is a dopamine surge. The first is the best it gets. From there, surges taper off and don’t reach the same peaks with the same level of stimulation. Paula’s feedback cycle mirrors exactly what happens with dopamine.
She draws this during the documentary around feedback to her work. Initially, people are delighted, taking it all in, and then once they reach the apex, start to ask about changes. She offers certain edits or clarifications and they reach another high. Here, she recommends ending the meeting, giving people time to adjust. If not, there’s risk of tweaking to the point of dissatisfaction or, as she puts it, sudden death.
Imagining the possibilities requires time to absorb and adjust. Often, the change is stark (this is a good thing!) which alarms the system (a survival response) that eventually goes rational with enough time. Editing too much during the shock phase rarely yields successful results.
The TL;DR Version
- Understand who is asking for the work. What do they value? What’s their world like?
- What artifacts exist that you should bring in? Color? Style?
- What are they doing now that you can refine, polish or perfect?
- Explore the data. Don’t worry about working too small.
- Weave it together.
- Make sure it fits.
- Introduce in a time-limited fashion. Keep in mind dopamine and cycle appropriately.
All quotes come from Netflix’s Abstract with Paula Scher. You should watch it. Some people would use the ‘i’-word, but since TED talks became en-vogue and that word became the de facto response, I’ll go with: it’ll knock your socks off and you’ll run around cheering…barefooted. Probably do it sooner than later, it’s getting cold.
