Design Matters

The Vienna-based International Institute for Information Design was formed.

Easterby and Zwaga publish the Het Vennenbos conference papers as Information Design: The Design and Evaluation of Signs and Printed Material. Have you read these papers? Please leave a comment.

Edward Tufte publishes The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and follows up later with Envisioning Information (1989) and Visual Explanations (1997). Have you read these books? Please leave a comment.

The first issue of the IDJ was published. Rob Waller and Bryan Smith are co-editors. Waller and Smith “tossed a number of terms about before settling on [the label information design], but whether it was original or not I can’t say.” The source for this quote was http://www.informationdesign.org/ida/origins.html, which is no longer online.

The Document Design Project is commissioned by the U.S. National Institute of Education. It lasts three years, and among other things, produced two foundational documents: Review of the Relevant Research, and Guidelines for Document Designers. Have you read these documents? Please leave a comment.

The NATO Conference on Visual Presentation of Information was held in Het Vennenbos, The Netherlands. The Information Design Journal (IDJ) was conceived during this conference.

Edward Hamilton writes that the “information designer is in reality a teacher–and no better compliment may be paid a professional designer than to call him a teacher.” In Graphic Design for the Computer Age.

Charles Minard draws Napoleon’s march against Moscow. See the information graphic that Edward Tufte calls “probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn. Can you add events between 1861 and the next entry, for 1970? Please leave a comment.