VisCom2: Ellen Lupton Info Graphic Reading "Diagram"

This section was particularly my favorite from the book thus far. I found myself marking several pages for different elements to consider. Both graphic use of line, and the wide variety of ideas was very helpful. She covered a wide range of ideas, and even the brief overview of Edward Tufte's sort of theory on info graphics provoked some thought. I'm torn between the idea of the absolute bare simplicity and minimalism that much successful design pulls from, and the extra fluff that adds character to it.  In the end however, I think I have to go against my initial instincts and love for minimalism and have to agree with Ellen on this issue. That fluff, or "chart junk" as Tufte puts it, is what often draws the viewer in, and really gives the designer the ability to express themselves and their style into the work. With the barebone approach that Tufte supports, the viewer is only approached with a simple graphic that gets the point across, but only leaves them with the knowledge. The designer doesn't leave much of an impact on the viewer in terms of their stylistic approach. And while I agree that the idea of the designer remaining annonymos is something beautiful, it tends to diminish the human designer into a designer, or group designers together as a whole.

A few elements I saw that I haven't really thought about are typography, transparency and overlapping, and being selective in what you show.  One reason why I've been straying away from location based diagrams so far is the showing of the map. There are so many diagrams that use the map. However, a few diagrams in the examples completely blew me away with their simple solution to their problem. One simply placed the dots/ icons on the map, and then deleted the map altogether, leaving only the distance between the points. This created simplicity and really played up typography and the graphic qualities of the colored lines they used.  Another diagram used only a few countries, but rather than using the whole world map, they only used those countries, and left the distance between the countries as an abstract thing by putting these countries that would normally be across the world from each other adjacent to one another.