Designing Information: Human Factors and Common Sense in Information Design

This book is an absolute gem. The book is beautifully designed and embraces current design thinking and considerations related to information design. I am a professional graphic designer/educator and have taught Information graphics for many years. The principles and examples displayed are coherent, intelligent and stunning. They are extremely important to the dissemination of clear communications across all media.

This is an incredibly comprehensive view into the complexity of information design. Regardless of the stage of your design career this book will help you better understand how you can design information to better communicate with your audience.

A great book but was not in new condition. Worn on the sides of binding.

Great book for my class.

I really love this book. It is very pedagogic.

The inside of the pages were mostly fine (some had a print problem), but what upset me the most was that the spine came damaged and the other sides were also damaged. I paid for a new book, so I was really disappointed. It came pretty dusty as well for some reason. Pretty disappointed.

Joel Katz is a great designer, and like many great designers he has worked in a variety of fields ranging from illustration to signage systems to photography to transportation maps. He is a great information designer. Information design is one of the design subdivisions that unites, rather than separates, the impulses of the field, a forced marriage of aesthetics and psychology dedicated to communicating complex information in ways that appear simple. It is a tough field to define and a tougher one to practice. As you read Designing Information you begin to understand that many people know with they like but few people like to know the truth. Reading this book may not invert that ratio, but it will supply those who want to communicate the truth a valuable set of principles and examples to apply to their task. We are living in a time when data journalism and info graphics are in high demand. The exponential growth of digital data sets is driving popular interest in data visualization. Interactive devices on our desks and in our hand keep us pointing and clicking and tapping and swiping at symbols we hope contain the information we are looking for. Our embrace of mobile devices has filled our pockets with vast quantities of incoming data. Our every move is spawning a cornucopia of quantification, enormous numbers of little differences that want to be communicated. Joel Katz has created a marvelous book on a difficult and important subject. He's done this by writing, selecting and designing over one hundred two-page spreads. There are two kinds of designers: ones who struggle to find a form to fit their content and ones who shape and chop their content to fit the form they want to make. It takes a master to make complex content fit into a simple format. It is why Katz's book is both simple and profoundly useful. Page after page presents a systematic collection of information design principles, problems, methods, samples, quotations and critiques. By illustrating each spread with a judicious and rich collection of examples from the field, combined with student work, he gives the reader the best of the practical and the imaginative. Each of the real-world examples illustrates principles and the way things really work. Anyone who has worked in this field will nod knowingly as Katz points out how, to use his own words, "every silver lining has a cloud". In the real world, carefully crafted results are often changed at the last minute to fit the constraints of the client's taste, politics or budget. The student examples drawn from his teaching experience provide a counterpoint, giving a freer reign to the ideas he wants us to learn. The book is also filled with instructive and memorable quotes from a range of design thinkers. Looking at the book, reading and re-reading its content, and reflecting on the results, I am reminded of a passage from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" by William Carlos Williams It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there. Williams also described a poem as a machine in which every word and syllable is intended to communicate. We are surrounded by communication filled with uninformation, noninformation, misinformation and disinformation, and all we really want is the poetry of information. Reading what Katz has written reminds me that we suffer each day for the lack of it. Designing Information will help you become a better designer whether you qualify that with services, products, graphics, user experience, interaction, urban planning, transportation or any of a dozen other epithets. Studying Designing Information will help you see the methods and craft that make information design succeed.

Joel Katz is a much-decorated information designer and teacher who lives and works in Philadelphia -hence many of the examples in this book come from that city. "Designing Information" is his contribution to texts on the subject, intended for information designers and students. Katz likes to communicate in pictures, naturally, so this is a heavily illustrated course on the do's and don't's of information design where the "task of information designers today is to refine and reduce an overabundance of data into meaningful and usable information." Text is always on the right page with illustrative examples on the facing left page. Interesting quotes and recommendations for further reading are found in a narrow far right column. The book is organized into six parts, the last of which contains credits and more examples. The first part, "Aspects of Information Design", imparts basic concepts regarding the purpose, pitfalls, and problems of information design. The second addresses "Qualitative Issues" such as using and misusing lines, shape, color, labeling, and conveying time. "Quantitative Issues" discusses usability versus completeness, dimensional comparison, substitution to indicate relative size or distance, and the perils of geography. Section Four is entitled "Structure, Organization, Type." It's about creating coherent forms that people can fill out and includes pictograms and fonts. Section Five, "Finding Your Way", is about maps, particularly public transportation maps. The discussions of maps and representations of geography offer some interesting insights. The section on structure would be useful to anyone designing for public consumption, including web design. I found the content of other sections to be more scattershot, less cohesive. The suggestions for background reading are varied, interesting and not limited to design texts. I've read some of the books that Katz suggests; they're relevant, imaginative choices that won't bore anyone. I like the information in the right column a lot. On the other hand, Katz tends to reduce the amount of information being presented in his diagrams, in order to simplify, more than, say, Edward R. Tufte. He has taken this approach with text too, with inconsistent results. It is not always clear what Katz is suggesting by his text or captions, and I was left puzzling over the examples. I found this in parts 1-3, not 4-6. This book is not as large as Tufte's books. It's 9.5 x 8 inches. Some examples are too small to make out the details, which is frustrating and hardly improves clarity of the ideas. Problems are sometimes presented without solutions or suggestions. And Katz's tendency to betray his political convictions in this choice of graphics and comment will irk some readers. Ironically, Katz does not always communicate well.

Ordered a physical book which I rarely do as it is full of imagery. However, I must say, the print is poor and being a book about design it does not fit at all. Feels cheap and damages its credibility. Paper is so thin that you can see the reverse print of the other page. Really a shame :(

Excelente libro: un libro básico para todo aquél que se dedique al diseño de información. Bien explicado, profusamente ilustrado y cubre las áreas básicas del diseño de información.

Très bien écrit et structuré.

Not a thing. To incite insight!