Stephen Anderson, designer and creator of the Mental Notes card deck, believes your users must be emotionally engaged if you want them to exhibit a certain behavior. Stephen uses simple visual representations to help people make choices and understand complex information. In this podcast, Stephen and Jared Spool discuss creating designs that engage your users’ emotions.

There’s a lot of work that goes into making a graphic beautiful and informative. But how efficient is your graphic? Are you emphasizing the right content or data of the graphic? Can the reader quickly find what they are looking for? Last week we featured an excerpt from Noah Iliinsky’s book Beautiful Visualization. The article [...]

The saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” is dead-on when it comes to information visualization. The ability to convey a message clearly, in the appropriate context, and make the information beautiful is no easy task. Information visualization is the graphic presentation of data. Done right, it’s like you’re looking through the eyes of [...]

Kate Brigham is the Patient Experience Manager at PatientsLikeMe. Rather than focusing solely on forums and discussion, she has helped create an environment that encourages sharing amongst the patients. In this podcast, Kate talks to Jared Spool about how PatientsLikeMe uses data visualizations to help create the level of understanding within the community.

The AIGA recently published the online version of their 2009 Salary Survey. I was really disappointed with their 1996 approach to the salary survey. The AIGA is filled with talented designers, yet they opted for an impossible-to-use book reader to display their hard work. Locking the survey up in a proprietary, unusable reader was a [...]

The skills you need to discover and fix many common visual design problems don’t require an art degree. The term “web design” implies knowledge and understanding of visuals, creative, even artistic ability. But not everyone practicing web design comes from this background, and the process of improving your site’s design can be daunting. Thankfully, Dan [...]

A normal day at the SmartMoney.com Map of the Market interactive market mapping tool: But yesterday was anything but a normal day: (The green box represents Barrick Gold, which saw a 4.5% increase in its value yesterday. The next biggest winner I could find was Campbell’s Soup at 0.32%. Gold? Soup lines? Hmmm.) Update: A [...]