design-newyork.com

I just saw some killer charts on and around the internet, let’s take a look.

This is a rather ingenious chart of the body’s systems shown like London’s subway map. The only problem I have with it is that I immediately assumed the urinary part would be yellow, yes? That seems intuitive. And yet, it is not.

Here is something that extremely funny to me, and maybe after I explain it, it will be funny to you as well. We recently did a big ole presentation for a potential client, and the fancy-schmancy award-winning graphic designer guy designed the posters, which looked like this:

(I pixelated some stuff because I don’t know if it’s proprietary or not.)

I thought is was a lovely design, very creative and fresh. Then, I saw this:

And I laughed and laughed and laughed, because apparently everyone is designing their charts like this, I just didn’t know. Not creative, not fresh, standard. Ha ha ha! I’m still the only one finding this funny, huh? Oh well.

This past weekend I went on my first business-related trip, to Orlando. I hear there’s some kind of amusement park there, but I wouldn’t know, because I was driven directly from the airport to the Dolphin Hotel Resort and Conference Center of Gigantitude. Seriously, it was a big big building, like the size of the entire Palisades Mall. To walk from your room to the conference area required thousands of steps to be taken. On my ride to the hotel I saw many pine trees covered with Spanish moss, some egrets, bog-type things and housing complexes. That’s it. The only way I knew I was near Disney-anything was when I saw people in the hotel wearing Mickey ear hats. Did you know there’s a variety of ear-hats? I saw someone wearing a pair that was covered in pink fluffy material and had a veil in the back, because apparently this woman was on her honeymoon or something wedding-y like that. Here’s the sad thing, though: the veil wasn’t white. It was an unpleasant shade of light yellow-brown, like it had been soaked in tea. An even more depressing possibility is the veil-n-ears were fifty years old and the lady wore it all the time, all delusional and out-of-touch. “I’m a bride today!” “Yes, yes, Grandma. We know, today you marry Pop-Pop and drive around in the turquoise convertible Chevrolet. Whatever you say.” I would like to talk to the marketing guy who thought that was a good idea. “Well, we could have a white veil, but everyone does that. Let’s make a color that looks like someone tinkled on it, that’ll really complement the faux pink fur.”

So, due to the fact that I was there for work, I saw nothing, not even the fireworks, so I can’t tell you anything about my trip that’s interesting (the hotel has carpeting! And complimentary soap! You can get room service if you want!), but in a semi-related point, I make a great many charts of various things here at my place of employment. That means I am always on the lookout for new and awesome ways to express information through charts. I’ve found a few ones on my travels through Ye Olde Internette that I will share with you now. They are from a website called Good.

And not from Good, but a personal favorite of mine: